How PetSafe avoided $2.6M in support costs while delivering a better customer experience
PetSafe Brands is a global pet products company with 5 brands, including a range of retail and DIY products as well as Invisible Fence, its professionally installed brand with white-glove setup and service. The catalog covers thousands of SKUs across categories like intelligent litter boxes, GPS trackers, and containment fences, each with distinct customer bases and troubleshooting profiles. As the portfolio grew and complexity increased, PetSafe's support team needed a way to keep up without scaling headcount or losing the premium experience customers expect. That called for a rethink of support from the ground up.
Region
Global
Industry
Connected devices / smart home
Mavenoid's impact
· 350% self-service growth
· $2.6M FTE costs avoided
· 75% deflection
· 83% CSAT
The challenge
Limited hours, mounting pressure to scale
Live customer support ran Monday through Saturday, 8am to 8pm, and outside those hours customers had no real path to help. Self-service barely existed beyond a handful of outdated support articles, and the team had no visibility into what customers needed during the hours they weren't open. At the same time, the business was asking the team to serve more customers without growing headcount.
A complex catalog with real safety stakes
That pressure collided with the complexity of PetSafe's catalog. Besides volume, many products are connected devices involving Wi-Fi or GPS, and the containment fences raise the stakes further: if the fence stops working, the pet can get loose, so customers can't always wait for business hours to get help.
Petsafe challenges
Customers trained to call rather than self-serve
PetSafe's phone number and email address appeared everywhere on packaging. The broader market hadn't yet been reshaped by ChatGPT, and most users had only encountered earlier-generation chatbots that responded to most questions with 'I can't help with that,' so they typed 'agent' the moment a chat window opened. Senior Manager for Digital Support Experience Joey Yow knew any solution would have to do real work for customers and rebuild their trust in self-service at the same time.
"Without an assistant capable of actually resolving issues, that traffic shift would have just relocated the volume rather than absorbing it."
Joey Yow
Senior Manager of Digital Support Experience at PetSafe
The solution
As PetSafe evaluated options, a few Mavenoid capabilities stood out:
Strong mobile experience out of the box, important given that about 99% of users hit PetSafe's sites from mobile
A flow builder that could handle complex troubleshooting paths with branching and back-navigation
Lean administration, since PetSafe doesn't have dedicated developers attached to customer care
About 99% of PetSafe's support traffic arrives on mobile.
Launching with five guided journeys
The team launched with five guided journeys, covering the products driving the highest contact volume. Mavenoid built out those initial flows and handled the branding, CSS, and embed code, which made for one of the easiest launches Joey has run. The remaining catalog was covered by AI retrieval in the meantime, keeping the team moving while more guided flows were built.
Scaling to full product coverage
Over the next two and a half years, PetSafe expanded to full product coverage, guided by Mavenoid's analytics alongside live contact data. After rolling out across the domestic brands, the team extended Mavenoid to PetSafe's global brands, which previously had no self-service or support site of their own.
Translation built in
Mavenoid translated PetSafe's English content into multiple languages, and real-time chat translation let agents support customers regardless of language. That changed how the team can flex resources: when the global team recently ran into service-level pressure, U.S.-based agents picked up international contacts directly, something that wouldn't have been possible before.
Self-service scheduling for Invisible Fence
For Invisible Fence, where service had historically been entirely live, PetSafe built API integrations into the company's scheduling system. Customers can now troubleshoot inside Mavenoid, complete an intake form, look up dealer coverage by zip code, and book a service appointment without leaving the assistant. The appointment ties back to Salesforce where the technician picks it up.
Bringing Mavenoid inside the contact center
Internal agents now use Mavenoid on the same flows external customers see, which has shortened onboarding and upskilling time for the support team.
The results
Since launch, Mavenoid has delivered measurable impact across cost, capacity, and customer experience:
350% growth in self-service interactions, measured in monthly conversations
44% drop in live agent volume across voice and email since 2022
$2.6M in FTE costs avoided over three years
75% deflection rate and 83% CSAT on the Mavenoid experience itself
Some of the conversation growth came from sustained demand the previous support hours simply never captured. Mavenoid's analytics showed that contact volume holds steady through midnight on weekdays and across Sunday. Some of it came from PetSafe removing phone numbers and email addresses from packaging and product literature and routing customers into the support site. Without an assistant capable of actually resolving issues, that traffic shift would have just relocated the volume rather than absorbing it.
Demand the old support hours never captured
Beyond the contact center
The qualitative impact has reached beyond the contact center. Brand and category managers outside customer care have started treating Mavenoid as part of the brand experience itself. PetSafe is now using it as a landing experience for SportDOG, a premium brand, where the polish of the assistant supports the positioning of the product.
Looking ahead
PetSafe recently signed a multi-year renewal, and the platform's role is expanding across new touchpoints. Voice is the next channel: order tracking, returns, and account resets are well-suited to AI voice and would let customers resolve transactional questions around the clock. In-app support is the second focus, with PetSafe wanting troubleshooting to operate inside the app and act on the customer's behalf, for example by triggering a reconnect attempt after a router reset. Pre-sales is the third, with short guided flows deployable through QR codes in stores to help customers pick the right product across in-ground, wireless, and GPS fencing options. That pre-sales work also reframes the platform internally: customer care is usually treated as a cost center, and being able to attribute revenue to the tool changes the conversation.
Reimagining Voice Support: The Journey to Multimodal CX with Broan-NuTone
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