Envato cuts first reply time with Zendesk AI

For nearly 20 years, Envato has helped creative professionals bring ideas to life. Today, the global creative marketplace serves more than two million users, giving customers access to stock photography, video, templates, fonts, graphics, and an expanding suite of AI-powered creative tools.

As AI reshapes the creative industry, Envato is embracing it across both its products and its customer experience. Now, Envato is applying AI to customer service—streamlining common inquiries, accelerating response times, and freeing agents to focus on more complex customer issues.

“What the AI agent has enabled us to do is really cut through and manage a lot of that basic, process-driven work,” Briany Kalms, Head of Author & Customer Success at Envato, says. “It’s really started to free our team up for higher-value work and interactions.”

Zendesk AI Agent automatically resolves one-third of customer inquiries across the products where Envato has deployed it. First response times have also fallen significantly, down from as high as 120 hours during December 2024. Now, the first response time for Envato’s Elements brand is at 1.5 hours.

“That’s the lowest we’ve ever had it—ever,” Kalms says.

Scaling customer service for a growing business

As Envato’s business expanded, so did the demands on its support organization, which averages 23,000+ tickets per month across all brands.

“We manage multiple product streams through Zendesk,” Kalms says. “And our team is about 50 people globally.”

Supporting customers at that scale meant maintaining fast, consistent service—even during periods of surging demand.

“Some of the biggest challenges we were trying to resolve were really consistency in our performance and response times,” Kalms says. “Historically, if we had big spikes in ticket volumes due to cyber sales or product releases, it would typically take us a really long time to recover from.”

Volume wasn’t the only challenge. Before agents could solve many customer issues, they first had to authenticate customers, gather information, and complete repetitive administrative work. Those manual steps slowed response times and made it harder to recover when ticket volumes surged.

Starting where AI could make the biggest impact

Envato didn’t try to automate every interaction overnight.

Instead, the team used Zendesk AI to analyze thousands of historical support conversations and identify the high-volume requests best suited for automation.

“We already knew we had an extremely high self-service rate with our Help Centers,” Eric Le Royer, who leads AI implementation for Envato’s support operations, says. “We wanted to focus on the low-value support interactions for customers who don’t want to search the Help Center—they just want the answer now.”

Envato designed its AI strategy to deliver immediate answers without sacrificing service quality. Straightforward questions could be resolved automatically, while more complex requests reached agents only after AI had gathered the necessary context.

“We created these hybrid workflows where AI gathers the information while providing empathy and explaining why we need it,” Le Royer says. “Once we have everything, we escalate it to a human.”

By removing manual work at the start of every interaction, Envato gave agents more time to solve problems instead of collecting information.

Faster service at every step

Envato’s Zendesk AI Agent now correctly identifies approximately 95 percent of incoming customer requests before determining whether they can be resolved automatically or routed to a support specialist.

One of Envato’s biggest wins has come from automating operational workflows that once required significant manual effort.

Previously, account deletion requests required repeated customer authentication and multiple handoffs across several brands before the process could even begin. Zendesk AI Agent authenticates customers, guides them through each step, gathers the required information, confirms their intent, and initiates the workflow before handing it to a support specialist.

“We’re one step away from having that completely automated,” Le Royer says.

For customers, the result is faster resolutions and fewer repetitive interactions. For support agents, it means arriving at conversations with the context they need to solve problems instead of spending valuable time collecting information.

Creating new opportunities for support teams

Instead of reducing headcount, Envato has focused on creating new opportunities for its people.

Two support specialists have moved into roles dedicated to reviewing AI conversations, identifying new automation opportunities, and continuously improving AI performance.

“Our main objective is to shift the focus of what our team is doing now onto something new,” Le Royer says. “Upskilling is definitely a large focus.”

As AI takes on more day-to-day work, support specialists now spend more time tackling complex customer issues and contributing insights that improve the broader business.

Building the next generation of customer service

Envato is working toward deeper integrations between Zendesk AI and its customer systems so AI can complete end-to-end workflows, from processing refund requests to taking account actions automatically.

“I think elevating our current AI implementation to agentic AI and really having it tap into our customer data and systems so that we can start resolving customer problems end to end automatically—that’s what will take us to the next level,” Kalms says.

Envato sees an opportunity to move beyond reactive support altogether.

With AI managing routine interactions, the team can focus on proactively helping customers before they ever need to submit a ticket.

“We’re hoping to get to the customer before they even hit our Help Center,” Le Royer says. “Previously, with that volume of tickets, there was just no time.”

For Envato, AI isn’t replacing human expertise—it’s helping the company deliver exceptional customer service at scale. By automating repetitive work and giving agents more capacity to focus on complex customer needs, Envato is ensuring creative professionals can spend less time waiting for support and more time bringing their ideas to life.