WelleCo scales premium wellness CX with Human + AI Agent Management & doubles automation to 90%+

When Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson co-founded WelleCo with Andrea Horwood in 2014, the brand was built around a single plant-based green powder, The Super Elixir, born out of Elle's own wellness journey. A decade on, WelleCo has grown into a global ingestible wellness brand with 17 elixirs across skin, hair, body, mind & kids categories, sold across Australia, the US, the UK & Europe.

As WelleCo scaled internationally, so did the demands on its customer support team. With over 1,000 tickets per week flowing across email, chat, SMS, Instagram, Facebook Messenger & reviews, and a premium brand promise to uphold, WelleCo needed a support partner that could deliver brand-consistent care at scale.

That's where Influx.com came in. Since December 2021, Influx has been WelleCo's dedicated customer support partner. Nearly five years on, the partnership has evolved from human-only support to a fully-managed Human + AI model, with automation rates climbing from 41% to over 90%, the human team closing 10% more tickets per day with the same headcount, & the partnership holding through major operational stress tests.

The team's agility in adjusting weekend rosters to manage Monday backlogs, and the detailed updates on the AI optimizations, have made a real difference. Influx feels like an extension of our team, not a vendor. KPIs feel like long-term goals to work toward together, not rigid pass/fail baselines.

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Lucy Marwick, eCommerce & CX Manager at WelleCo

The challenge

By late 2025, WelleCo was already a long-standing Influx customer, with a human support team handling 800–1,200 tickets per week across eight channels. Ticket volumes had grown alongside the brand, & the internal WelleCo team was looking for ways to introduce automation without compromising on brand voice or customer experience.

In October 2025, WelleCo signed a one-year contract with a third-party AI vendor, starting with two automation intents: order tracking & subscription cancellation. On paper, this would reduce the load on the internal team & free Influx's human agents to focus on higher-value support.

In practice, the AI struggled.

By January 2026, first-response times had tripled, from 52 minutes to 3 hours. The AI was incorrectly processing refunds, failing to cancel subscriptions, sharing wrong discount calculations, & giving inaccurate cancellation policies. Handover tickets, where the AI escalated to human agents, often required agents to re-read long conversation histories, slowing resolution times further.

WelleCo's then-CX lead, Phoebe, was spending significant time each week manually flagging errors to the AI vendor. During a February check-in, she told the Influx team that managing the AI manually was consuming too much of her time. Automation had become a second job.

This was the moment to rethink the model.

The solution

Rather than replace the AI or add more humans, Influx proposed something different: take over the daily management of WelleCo's existing AI agent.

In February 2026, Influx presented its Managed AI Service. In March 2026, WelleCo transitioned to Influx AI Agent Management, with a dedicated AI Agent Manager joining the WelleCo account & running the daily improvement flywheel against the live AI.

The new team structure:

• 1.5 human agents covering AU peak hours & complex tier-2 tickets, embedded in the WelleCo Gorgias workspace alongside the AI
• 1 dedicated AI Agent Manager running the third-party AI daily, engineering better context, testing changes in an isolated simulator, & deploying only what worked
• Closed-loop feedback between the humans & the AI Manager: every mistake a human spotted got fed back, fixed, tested, & redeployed within a day

The AI Agent Manager runs a four-step flywheel every day:

1. Analyse: Review ticket data & performance gaps
2. Train: Engineer context across static (brand voice, products, policies), ephemeral (sales, promotions), & real-time (shipping, inventory, admin) layers
3. Test: Run thousands of simulated queries against benchmark responses in an isolated simulator
4. Deploy: Ship validated updates with versioning & instant rollback, invisible to customers

The whole flywheel runs behind the scenes. No customer ever sees a test-in-progress. When something breaks in the real world, the AI Manager retunes the AI within hours, not months.

For WelleCo, this meant that a Human + AI model finally worked as promised: the AI handled the volume & the repeatable intents, the humans handled the complex tier-2 work, & the AI Manager kept both aligned to the WelleCo brand voice.

Impact achieved

• 90%+ automation rate achieved in May.
• +10% tickets closed per day by the same human team.
• 1,715 tickets closed in a single peak week.
• Automation Rate: Climbed from 41.4% before Influx AI Management to 90%.
• Post-AI Follow-up: Cut from 36% to 21% within a month of Influx taking over. Fewer tickets needed human intervention after the AI, freeing the human team for higher-value work.
• Human Throughput: The same 1.5 human agents went from closing ~90 tickets per day to ~100+, with no additional headcount. In one peak week in mid-June 2026, the combined Human + AI team closed 1,715 tickets against 1,537 created, net-reducing the queue while volume was still climbing.
• AI CSAT: Improved from 4.56 to 4.66 (March vs April), even as the AI took on a larger share of total ticket volume.
• Ticket Inbound: Dropped 24% in the four weeks after Influx took over AI management (from 1,318 to 997 tickets per week), as fewer customers re-contacted support due to unresolved AI conversations.

Weathering the stress test

Any real-world CX operation gets tested by events outside its control. For WelleCo, that test came in May 2026.

WelleCo transitioned to a new global warehousing partner, across 3 international regions, which resulted in a volume surge of CX tickets while the issues were being resolved. The backlog climbed to 443 tickets by early June. Combined CSAT briefly dropped to 3.78.

This is where Human + AI Management proved its value.

Within two weeks, Influx's AI Agent Manager retuned the AI's handover rules, tightened automation rules to prevent tickets bypassing the AI unnecessarily & worked with WelleCo to strengthen spam filters. In parallel, the human team introduced weekend coverage, a new roster structure designed to prevent Monday backlogs from building up over quiet periods.

By mid-June:

• Combined CSAT recovered to 4.37
• Backlog cut from 270 to 180 in a single week
• 1,715 tickets closed against 1,537 created, net-reducing the queue

A static AI agent, one running without daily management, would not have adapted to the warehouse migration in time. It would have kept giving the same responses, kept escalating the same tickets, & the operation would have collapsed. Active AI Management meant the entire support system could flex around a supply chain event that had nothing to do with the AI itself.

That's the difference Human + AI Management makes: not just automation, but automation you can trust when things get hard.

Get started with Influx

Influx was established in 2013 & has been trusted by 750+ brands globally, ranging from startup to scale.

Influx builds 24/7, near-shore global customer support teams. We provide fully managed, flexible & high-performance agents. Our services range from eCommerce support, tech support, sales support, AI Management, Enterprise solutions and more to give you the customer assistance you need to prioritize other responsibilities and continue scaling your business.

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