Lumen & Oak sells solid-wood furniture and upholstery online across the United States and Canada. Its average order is $1,850. Most of it ships by freight, and the largest pieces travel with white-glove carriers who bring them into the room, assemble them and take the packaging away.
That model makes customers very happy when it works. When it doesn't, it produces the most complex, most emotional contacts in e-commerce.
The challenge
In 2024, Lumen & Oak's 62-person care team handled about 410,000 conversations. Only a quarter were simple order-status questions. The rest were delivery exceptions: an item on backorder, a dining set shipping in three boxes on three different days, a delivery window that no longer works, a sofa that arrives damaged in transit.
Each exception touched several systems. Orders lived in Shopify Plus. Inventory, purchase orders and backorder dates lived in NetSuite. Delivery windows lived in the portals of four regional white-glove carriers. Tickets lived in Zendesk. Resolving a single "where is the rest of my order" contact meant opening all of them.
Credits made it harder. Care agents could offer concessions for delays and damage, but the rules lived in a 40-page wiki. Some agents gave too much. Others gave nothing and the customer escalated to social media. Finance could not tell which.
Cost per contact was $9.40 and rising. Handle time on damage contacts averaged 17 minutes.
"We didn't have a volume problem. We had a complexity problem. Every contact needed four tabs and a judgment call." — Clara Whitfield, VP Customer Care
Why Pazau
Lumen & Oak had tried a chatbot inside Zendesk in 2023. It deflected order-status questions to the tracking page and handed everything else to a human. Deflection went up. So did repeat contacts.
The team chose Pazau in March 2025 for three reasons.
Procedures, not decision trees. The care team could write its exception playbook in plain language, the way it trained new agents: "If an item in a multi-piece order is backordered more than 21 days, offer to ship the in-stock pieces now or hold the full order." Pazau Agent follows those steps and shows its reasoning.
Actions with limits. Pazau integrates with Shopify Plus and NetSuite out of the box. Lumen & Oak built custom Actions against its carriers' APIs in two weeks. Every Action that moves money has a ceiling and an approval route.
One workspace. Moving from Zendesk to Pazau Inbox put AI and human agents in one queue. When Pazau Agent hands a conversation off, the agent sees the full trace: what the customer said, which systems were checked, which credit was offered.
The rollout
April 2025: migration. Lumen & Oak moved its macros, tags and 18 months of ticket history from Zendesk to Pazau Inbox over one weekend. Agents trained for two hours.
May: backorders and partial shipments. The Backorder update Procedure reads the expected date from NetSuite with get_po_eta and explains it in plain language. The Split shipment Procedure tells customers which pieces are coming when, and offers to consolidate with hold_for_consolidation or ship in-stock items now with release_partial_shipment. Before either went live, the team simulated them against 3,000 past conversations. The simulation flagged a gap: customers asking to cancel just the backordered item. The team added a step the same afternoon.
June: delivery windows. The Reschedule delivery Procedure pulls available slots from the carrier with get_carrier_windows and books one with reschedule_delivery. If the new window is more than 10 days out, the Procedure offers a $50 courtesy credit.
July: damage in transit. This was the one the team had been nervous about. The Damaged on arrival Procedure asks for photos, checks the order and the carrier's delivery notes, and then offers a choice: a replacement part, a full replacement, or a partial refund. Credits follow a clear ladder:
- Up to $150: Pazau Agent applies the credit directly with
issue_store_credit. - $150 to $600: the credit goes to a care lead for one-tap approval in Pazau Inbox.
- Over $600, or any full-price refund on upholstery: a human agent owns the conversation.
At the same time, the Action file_carrier_claim opens a damage claim with the carrier, attaching the customer's photos, so Lumen & Oak recovers the cost.
"The approval step is what won over our finance team. They can see every credit, who approved it, and which rule it followed. We've had fewer arguments about concessions in a year than we used to have in a month." — Devon Marsh, Director of Retail Finance
The results
Lumen & Oak measured results over the twelve months to July 2026.
- Cost per contact fell 38%, from $9.40 to $5.83, including Pazau's per-resolution fees.
- 66% of delivery exceptions are resolved end-to-end by Pazau Agent. Across all contact types, the AI resolution rate is 71%.
- CSAT on exception contacts rose 11 points, from 72 to 83. Customers rate AI-resolved exceptions slightly higher than human-resolved ones, mostly because they are faster.
- Concession spend fell 19% while CSAT went up. Credits are now consistent. The same situation gets the same offer.
- Carrier damage recoveries rose 2.4×. Every damage contact now files a carrier claim with photos attached. Before, about a third did.
- Handle time on human-owned damage contacts fell from 17 minutes to 8, because agents start from Pazau's summary instead of from zero.
Lumen & Oak did not reduce headcount. It stopped backfilling attrition and moved eight agents into a new design-consultation team that helps customers choose fabrics and sizes before they buy.
What's next
Pazau Insights now scores 100% of conversations for quality and tags every contact with its driver. That data has changed conversations outside the care team. In January 2026, Insights showed that one carrier's damage rate on sectionals was three times the others. Lumen & Oak moved that volume to a different carrier in February.
"Insights gave us the one thing care never had: the data to change what happens upstream. We're not just cleaning up exceptions anymore. We're preventing them." — Clara Whitfield, VP Customer Care
Next up is proactive outreach. When NetSuite pushes back a purchase-order date, Pazau Agent will message affected customers first, explain the delay, and offer the split-ship or hold choice before they have to ask.