Tremendous helps businesses send rewards, incentives, and payouts to people around the world. Its support organization serves two distinct audiences: the businesses sending payouts and the recipients receiving them. Both expect a seamless experience, whether that means managing a rewards program or getting help accessing a gift card.
As Tremendous grew, so did the demands on its support organization. Over the past four and a half years, weekly support volume increased from roughly 2,500 tickets to nearly 60,000 interactions across chat, email, and voice. Recipient inquiries account for more than ten times the volume of business client support, creating a significant opportunity for automation.
With Decagon, Tremendous has transformed how it delivers support. Today, Decagon is the first point of contact for reward recipients across chat, email, and voice, resolving complex requests through agentic workflows and tailoring support experiences to individual enterprise clients.
The results have enabled Tremendous to rethink its operating model: achieving nearly 90% deflection, improving CSAT to 92%, and transitioning away from outsourced support toward a fully internal team supported by AI.
Scaling support beyond the limits of traditional automation
Just a few years ago, Tremendous primarily supported reward recipients through email, handling approximately 2,000 to 2,500 tickets per week. At that volume, a business process outsourcing (BPO) model was sufficient to manage demand.
As Tremendous expanded its support channels and ticket volume grew, scaling the BPO team became increasingly challenging. At its peak, Tremendous relied on approximately 18 external support agents, making it difficult to hire and ramp high performers quickly enough to keep pace with demand while maintaining service quality.
To reduce its reliance on growing headcount, Tremendous began investing in AI-powered support early, experimenting with platforms including Lang, Ada, and Ultimate. These tools delivered meaningful improvements, with Ada reaching approximately 65% deflection on chat at its peak. But automation remained fragmented across channels.
Ada handled chat automation, while Ultimate (now Zendesk AI Agents) handled email. Managing separate platforms meant multiple vendor relationships and continued reliance on human agents for requests that required more than a knowledge-based answer.
Tremendous needed a unified, omnichannel platform that could reliably execute actions across channels and give the support team the flexibility to build and improve workflows without depending on engineering for every change.
From answering questions to resolving issues across every channel
Tremendous began its Decagon rollout with chat and email, prioritizing its highest-volume channels before expanding into voice. Within 30 days, the team had a strong initial implementation that could match and begin exceeding the capabilities of its previous automation tools.
From there, the focus shifted toward building Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs) that could resolve issues rather than provide information alone.
The team prioritized high-volume requests that previously required human intervention, starting with reward resends. Customers frequently contacted Tremendous after losing or deleting the email containing their reward, but even these straightforward requests required a support agent.
With Decagon, Tremendous built an AOP that verifies reward ownership through a two-factor authentication process and automatically resends the reward. What previously required human intervention could now be resolved entirely through self-service.
That success paved the way for more sophisticated workflows. Today, Decagon can cancel payouts, exchange rewards, and resolve common issues. Tremendous has also extended these capabilities to voice, where Decagon handles requests such as reward resends and escalates to the in-house support team when additional assistance is needed.
Across chat, email, and voice, Decagon provides 24/7/365 support, with deflection trending near 90%, compared with a peak of approximately 65% chat deflection with its previous solution.
That omnichannel approach has also improved the customer experience. Over the past 12 months, Tremendous achieved 92% CSAT with Decagon, compared with 86% for its BPO team. First response times dropped from approximately one business day to immediate, while average resolution time fell from roughly one business day to 3.5 business hours.
Tremendous can now deliver faster, more consistent support at scale while reserving human expertise for more complex issues.
Extending personalization from recipients to enterprise clients
With a scalable foundation for recipient support in place, Tremendous has expanded what's possible for the businesses behind those payouts.
Each enterprise client has different expectations for how its recipients should be supported. Some prioritize fast, automated resolution, while others want to remain closely involved in the support experience.
With Decagon's custom AOPs, Tremendous can tailor support workflows to individual enterprise clients, offering different levels of automation, escalation, and involvement based on their needs.
For one enterprise client, reward cancellations previously required multiple handoffs between Tremendous, the recipient, and the client, often taking several business days. With a custom AOP and the client's authorization, Decagon can now process eligible cancellations directly, cutting the number of interactions in half and enabling same-day resolution.
Other enterprise clients prefer a more hands-on approach. Tremendous has configured AOPs that identify recipients associated with specific organizations and immediately escalate their requests with the appropriate context, ensuring the client gets involved from the start.
This flexibility allows Tremendous to offer more differentiated support experiences without adding the operational burden of managing separate processes for every client. It also creates opportunities to strengthen enterprise relationships, increase client satisfaction, and deliver added value that supports retention and growth.
As Emily Russell, Director of Support at Tremendous, explains, "Being able to offer that level of flexibility with AOPs has been incredibly valuable for us and has increased our client satisfaction."
Redesigning the support organization around AI
Decagon's impact extends beyond improving the customer experience. With recipient support deflection trending near 90%, Tremendous is transitioning away from its BPO model toward a fully internal team, with Decagon handling the majority of incoming requests.
Tremendous has already hired ahead of that transition, preparing an internal recipient support organization to operate without the external BPO team.
This shift is also changing how the support team operates. AI is becoming a dedicated function within support, with a specialized AI auditing and automation lead responsible for maintaining agent performance, improving workflows, and identifying new opportunities for automation.
With Decagon, the team can take greater ownership of those improvements without relying on engineering for every change. Using Duet, Tremendous built an internal tool for managing abusive recipients in a matter of weeks, without requiring its own engineering team.
The team also uses Autopilot to identify new automation opportunities, optimize existing AOPs, and flag issues requiring attention. Tremendous has invested in training support team members to write and debug AOPs, use Duet, and analyze performance, empowering them to become AI experience architects who actively design, manage, and improve the customer experience.
That same visibility is helping support contribute more strategically to the business. Previously, understanding customer trends required manually searching through Zendesk and other systems, reviewing tickets, and piecing together estimates. Now, team members can use Duet to analyze conversations across channels and answer questions about ticket volume, CSAT, and top support intents in approximately five minutes.
These insights help Tremendous identify recurring customer pain points, quantify their impact, and make more informed recommendations to product and other departments.
Together, these capabilities are shifting the support team's role from managing ticket volume to acting as AI experience architects, with the tools and autonomy to design better workflows, continuously improve service, and influence business decisions.
Tremendous's long-term goal is to maintain a lean, high-performing support organization, even as the business continues expanding.
Building a more flexible, intelligent support experience
Looking ahead, Tremendous plans to extend Decagon's capabilities across more of the customer experience.
On the client support side, where Decagon already provides 24/7 chat assistance through the Tremendous dashboard, the team is exploring additional automation as business customer volume grows.
Tremendous is also working toward multilingual voice support in French and Spanish to support international expansion, alongside more personalized experiences that adapt to customers' familiarity with Tremendous and their previous interactions.
Another priority is helping Decagon recognize and respond to dynamic issues, such as third-party reward provider outages, so customers can receive clearer explanations and next steps without waiting for a human to investigate.
What began as a search for a better way to manage growing ticket volume has become a new operating model for Tremendous, one that enables the team to scale efficiently, unlock new opportunities, and deliver more tailored customer experiences that drive business growth.
