B2B logistics · 340 employees
Northwind
Eleven support workflows moved to durable runs. Median handle time fell from 6m 40s to 4m 24s without adding headcount.
6m 40s → 4m 24s
Median handle time
31% → 3.8%
Tickets needing manual redo
11
Workflows migrated
0
Headcount added
The challenge
Northwind's support team ran a prompt chain that answered roughly two thirds of incoming tickets. The other third stalled somewhere in the middle, and because nothing recorded where, the only recovery was to start the ticket over manually. Agents stopped trusting the automation and began checking every answer, which cost more time than the automation saved.
What they built
They rebuilt the same eleven workflows as checkpointed runs. Nothing about the prompts changed. What changed was that a stalled run now resumed at its last completed step, a rate-limited knowledge-base call retried on a policy instead of failing the ticket, and every draft carried the documents it had read.
The result
Median handle time fell 34 percent in the first quarter. The share of tickets requiring a full manual redo went from 31 percent to under 4 percent. The team did not grow.
“We deleted 4,000 lines of retry logic and replaced it with one policy file.”