How Groove Life resolves 78% of conversations with Gladly AI

A chatbot that frustrated customers and left agents without context

In 2024, Groove Life's leadership moved customer service from Gladly to Zowie, which promised more automation for its lifetime warranty process. The CX team didn't want to go. "Reps loved Gladly so much that a switch was scary," said Missy Edwards, the customer experience manager at Groove Life.

The move didn't deliver. Zowie's chatbot couldn't connect with customers, and conversations that started by text and continued by email didn't link together, forcing agents to dig for context. Customer satisfaction scores, which had been around 4.9 on Gladly, fell into the 3s for months.

When the Zowie contract came up for renewal, Missy pushed leadership to look at other options. Groove Life evaluated Gladly, Gorgias and Zendesk. Ultimately, Gladly was the obvious choice — a decision made even stronger by its newly enhanced AI workflows.

Conversational AI, full customer context, and an easy-to-manage platform

Within weeks of coming back, Groove Life had its AI answering customers across email and SMS, with agents stepping in only when a conversation needed a person.

How Groove Life uses Gladly:

An AI with Groove's personality

Groove Life named its AI Gigi, short for Groove Intelligence, and trained her to reflect the team's southern hospitality: warm, empathetic and personal.

Cross-channel automation

Gigi handles customer conversations across email and SMS, including warranty questions, order changes, and product questions.

Full customer context and easy handoffs

Missy sets simple rules so Gigi passes specific requests to the team automatically. When a person steps in, they see the customer's entire history in one conversation, whether it started by text or email.

Warranty status in the conversation

Gladly connects with Redo, Groove Life's warranty platform, so agents can see whether a claim is approved or waiting on payment without leaving the conversation.

Easy to manage in-house

Missy updates Gigi's knowledge and builds workflows herself, so she can fix issues the moment she spots them in her daily review of AI conversations.

Live in four weeks, with a fraction of the manual work

Gladly's sales and onboarding teams worked closely with Missy to get Groove Life live in just four weeks. In the first weeks after launch, the team saw:

• Nearly 60% fewer conversations needing a person in its first three weeks (about 3,400, versus almost 13,000 over a typical four to five weeks on Zowie)

• 78% of conversations resolved by AI each week since returning to Gladly

• 4 weeks to go live

Automation mattered, but so did the experience for agents and customers. Gladly kept every conversation in one place, gave agents a help desk that was easy to use, and backed it with sales and onboarding teams who made every step clear.