1-800-Flowers.com, Inc. is one of America’s most iconic retail companies.

What started as a single flower shop in Manhattan more than 50 years ago has grown into an exciting gifting destination that millions of people trust to express what matters most. Their portfolio comprises beloved brands including 1-800-Flowers.com®, Harry & David® and Things Remembered.  From fresh floral to premium food and entertaining offerings, to one-of-a-kind personalization, the brand provides a best-in-class destination to elevate the consumer gifting experience inspiring human connection, expression, and celebration.

Throughout the company’s blossoming growth and expansion, one tenet has remained central to it all: providing an experience and brand that instills consumer trust.  A trust that has been carefully cultivated over decades by showing up for generations of customers for their most important milestones and daily rituals.

As Chief Product and AI Officer Henry Mori emphasizes, “We help people during their most important life moments. Customer care is not only central, but essential to our business. With a caring team obsessed with service, we are continually investing in ways to enhance how customers engage with our brands.”‍

The opportunity

As AI-driven commerce accelerates and consumer expectations for personalization outpace existing infrastructure, 1-800-Flowers.com saw an opportunity to get ahead of the shift by staying true to the brand’s core and delivering a “gifting concierge” experience at scale. Specifically, for 1-800-Flowers.com, this means understanding not just what customers are asking, but why, and in real time.

“Success means delivering high-quality, emotionally intelligent resolution at scale,” Mori says. “A customer purchasing a sympathy arrangement should be met with a fundamentally different tone and experience than one buying a birthday gift.

To get there, the company needed a system that could combine deep contextual understanding with operational rigor, improving resolution rates while dramatically increasing customer satisfaction.

Existing automation wasn’t keeping pace: homegrown solutions delivered low CSAT, containment lagged, and rigid IVR systems frequently misrouted customers whose phrasing didn’t match expected inputs.‍

The evaluation

1-800-Flowers.com structured their evaluation around two metrics: containment rate and CSAT. Both had to improve, and the rigorous process required a proof-of-value pilot with live A/B testing before any commitment.

Strong metrics were the baseline, but the right partner also had to go further. They needed a team that understood what made 1-800-Flowers.com special to its customers and could translate that into an experience that made every customer feel like they had a personal gifting concierge.

The evaluation ran as a live head-to-head comparison, with Decagon going up against one other finalist in a 45-day proof-of-concept through the full Harry & David peak season. Real interactions, real stakes.

Decagon outperformed on both core metrics, delivering higher containment and stronger CSAT scores more consistently throughout the evaluation period. When issues arose, they were identified and resolved quickly. That level of performance comes from how the platform is built: Decagon's Watchtower continuously audits agent outputs, flags issues in real time, and provides the visibility needed to keep AI performing at scale.

This sealed the deal, and gave the 1-800-Flowers.com team the confidence that performance would hold when it mattered most.

“The guardrails, the quality of output, the transparency given to us as the customer, that’s what makes AI actually operational,” Mori says.

The pilot closed with CSAT nearing 93% - double-digit points higher than previous automation.‍

The result

Decagon has proved its agents can handle the complexity of the needs of 1-800-Flowers.com  customers. Before a customer says a word, the agent already knows what they purchased and why.

To achieve that kind of contextual handling, it required a team willing to get into the details. Throughout implementation, the Decagon team worked alongside the 1-800-Flowers.com customer care, brand, and marketing stakeholders to define tone, language, and the precise behaviors they wanted reflected in every interaction. The result was a set of Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs) built in plain natural language - putting agent behavior in the hands of domain experts, not just engineers - enabling faster iteration, greater transparency, and stronger agent performance.

“You’re not just talking about engineers implementing these solutions. The non-technical vertical experts can read and reason through these policies, audit conversations, and understand why the agent did what it did. That visible reasoning is very powerful.” says Mori.

Since going live, the Decagon team has remained embedded in how 1-800-Flowers.com develops and refines its agent experience, contributing to AOPs, quality reviews, and the ongoing work of making every interaction better.

Decagon agents now support customers across 1-800-Flowers.com, Harry & David, and Shari’s Berries with expansion planned across Cheryl's Cookies and the broader portfolio.

What’s next

1-800-Flowers.com is continuing to expand Decagon’s role beyond reactive support into proactive use cases, sales and marketing applications, and logistics coordination, making AI an active layer across the full customer journey, not just a resolution tool.

The opportunity ahead is significant: rooted in connection and built to grow.

As personalization becomes an expectation rather than a differentiator, 1-800-Flowers.com will lead their market by providing a 24/7 AI concierge to every customer that stems from its strong roots. In doing so, their longstanding commitment to customer care will flourish into the next half century- and beyond.