“ BY OFFLOADING REPETITIVE INQUIRIES TO THIS AI AGENT, WE WOULD FREE UP OUR EMPLOYEES’ TIME TO FOCUS ON MORE HIGH-VALUE INTERACTIONS..."
FACING THE CHALLENGES
But providing fast, effective customer service and support for its understandably demanding clientele has been challenging.
Scott, who joined Thrive in 2024, says that his company had been grappling with repetitive call volume and cumbersome phone tree systems that dragged down efficiency while increasing wait times.
“ The pressing need for 24 / 7 quick remediation by leveraging more intelligent automation was not just beneficial, but essential,” he says.
In early 2024, Thrive built its NextGen platform on ServiceNow, using two solutions:
• Advanced Work Assignment( AWA). It automatically assigns and pushes work items to support team members, based on their availability, capacity, and skills. ServiceNow hosts the solution for Thrive through its European and Asian data centers.
• Task Intelligence. Powered by AI, it provides language detection, record categorization, sentiment analysis, and document intelligence.
“ The ServiceNow solution was chosen not only for its automation capabilities but for its ability to seamlessly integrate with our existing platform, ensuring consistency, scalability, and enterprise-grade reliability,” says Scott.
Then, as AI became more capable and customer expectations rose, Scott recognized that increased AI incorporation, or infusion, into Thrive’ s contact center application was critical to reshaping operations fundamentally. It also wanted to tap the capabilities of agentic AI.
“ When I joined Thrive and understood that our platform was built on ServiceNow, it was clear that using AI and automation to get us closer to the customer made absolute sense and could be implemented as part of that platform,” says Scott.
AI AGENT GOALS
Scott had two goals. One was to bring the company’ s engineering resources closer to the customers. This would solve their issues faster, thus ensuring that these interactions were as efficient and effective as possible.
Two, to improve the experience of these employees by enabling them to flex their skills and use their time more productively by handling complex, emotionally sensitive, or ambiguous cases.
In early 2025 Scott approached Service- Now about adding an autonomous AI agent, Summarization. This agent would handle high-volume, routine requests such as balance checks and billing inquiries, specifically:
• Case summarization, condensing case details into a brief overview highlighting the issue, actions, and status, providing quicker customer interaction.
• Improved prioritization of tasks based on contextual client impact.
• Dashboards and operational level agreements( OLAs), helping to drive successful business outcomes.
“ BY OFFLOADING REPETITIVE INQUIRIES TO THIS AI AGENT, WE WOULD FREE UP OUR EMPLOYEES’ TIME TO FOCUS ON MORE HIGH-VALUE INTERACTIONS..."
-- SCOTT STEELE
“ By offloading repetitive inquiries to this AI agent, we would free up our employees’ time to focus on more high-value interactions that require empathy, judgment, and deep technical knowledge,” says Scott.“ Overall, we sought a smarter, more collaborative workforce model that blends automation and humanity.”
IMPLEMENTATION, INCLUDING TRAINING
To deploy the new AI agent, Thrive utilized proven change management processes coupled with transparency around them, goals, and how they affect the support reps employing them.
IT CX
Here are the steps the company used:
1. Communicating the project and outcomes to everyone.
2. Piloting the solution to identify any modifications needed.
3. Modifying the solution based on feedback.
4. Roll-out through defined success criteria.
5. Training all employees in the new processes throughout the rollout with touchpoints to maintain the feedback loop.
6. Monitoring to ensure the outcomes meet expectations.
“ The overall flow of implementing these new processes and capabilities went well and has set both the baseline and expectation that we are on a journey of transformation,” says Scott.“ The integration was seamless and required minimal training for the operations teams.”
RESULTS
The results of these investments, in 2024 and 2025, have been impressive, reports Scott. While first contact resolution( FCR) rates increased to 73 %, upgraded monitoring thresholds enabled a more robust alerting model. The solutions delivered faster alert generation and improved deduplication of related events, resulting in a 63 % reduction in response times and streamlined resolution.
The introduction of AI allowed Thrive to reskill 32 engineers, shifting them from administrative, Level 1 intake roles to more technical, resolution-focused positions.
This strengthened the team’ s ability to address complex customer issues. But it also saved an impressive 21,000 hours of manual time within the first several months by routing over 315,000 tasks via automated workflows.
The shift then allowed engineers to focus on high-value, emotionally complex interactions, leading to improved employee engagement and a deeper sense of empowerment.
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