ActiveCampaign Deflects More than 60% of Chat Tickets and Launches a Full AI Program with Forethought

ActiveCampaign scaled CX with a smart AI foundation

ActiveCampaign is known for helping marketers do more with less. But behind the scenes, their customer experience team is doing the same at scale.

Customer experience plays a critical role in helping users launch campaigns, troubleshoot technical issues, and get the most out of the platform. Many of those requests are routine. Others are complex. And with over 800 employees—with around half of them working in customer-facing roles—ActiveCampaign needed a way to handle both without slowing down.

Their AI implementation started as a tool to reduce ticket volume, but has grown into something much bigger. Today, ActiveCampaign has a full team dedicated to managing AI across the customer organization. Their role is all about building and refining workflows that make experiences faster, more consistent and genuinely helpful, so both customers and internal team members get what they need, when they need it, whether there’s a human involved or not.
‍

CHALLENGES

Legacy chatbots couldn’t keep up with customer needs

When the AI boom hit, ActiveCampaign’s team was already feeling the strain of their old support tools. Their chatbot relied on rigid decision trees, and every update had to be made by hand. It was clunky, outdated, and hard to scale.

At the same time, leadership was pushing hard to invest in AI. Everyone saw the opportunity, especially in CX, where the use case was obvious. But finding the right tool was harder than expected. Most vendors they talked to were building AI as an add-on. The products sounded promising, but under the hood, many were still early-stage.

“A lot of what we saw felt like signing onto a roadmap instead of a real product. There were too many promises and not enough substance.” – Phil Lynch, Senior AI Program Manager at ActiveCampaign

Companies were asking them to bet on features that didn’t exist yet and charging a premium for it. Forethought stood out because it was built with AI as its foundation. ActiveCampaign didn’t realize how powerful it would be until they saw it in action.

‍

SOLUTION

ActiveCampaign upgraded CX with Solve, Assist, and Autoflows

ActiveCampaign started with a clear goal: replace the old chatbot with something smarter. Forethought Solve was the first step. The AI-powered chat solution lives in the help center, pulls directly from the knowledge base, and could immediately answer most of the simple, high-volume questions without button-based decision trees or guesswork.

The team also rolled out Forethought Assist, so agents could use the same intelligence on the back end. That meant faster prep before calls, easier access to context, and less time switching between tools. The biggest shift, though, came with Autoflows. That’s where Forethought’s Agentic AI really started to change how support worked by being able to take more and more action on behalf of the customer.

Forethought Solve deflects routine tickets instantly

​​Forethought Solve is the AI platform behind ActiveCampaign’s customer-facing chatbot. It’s trained on the company’s internal knowledge base and built to handle support from start to finish by answering questions, classifying tickets, and deflecting volume automatically.

Most of the tickets Solve sees are straightforward. About 70% of customer questions are quick and transactional, and Solve clears them out before they ever reach a human. The team named the bot Ace—their ActiveCampaign Expert—and saw immediate results.

Here, Ace walks a user through the steps to create a new campaign as an example of the kind of high-volume requests it deflects every day. Solve uses generative AI to understand what customers are asking, respond in natural language, and improve over time. That gives agents more time to focus on the 30% of tickets that actually need a human.

But even with Solve running smoothly, the team saw more opportunity. Every extra percentage point of deflection was worth hundreds of saved tickets, so they turned to Autoflows.

Autoflows became the core of ActiveCampaign’s AI strategy

While Forethought Solve helped ActiveCampaign deflect questions, Autoflows helped them do something bigger—resolve issues end-to-end. Autoflows is Forethought’s agentic AI reasoning engine. It takes the next step after a question is answered. Instead of routing to an agent or requiring a customer to take the next step, Autoflows can take action directly inside tools like CRMs and help desks.

The team doesn’t have to build decision trees or rules. It just tells Autoflows the outcome they want, and the AI figures out how to get there. That kind of autonomy changed what the team could automate.

“Once we started using Autoflows, the way we thought about automation shifted,” said Phil. “We weren’t just clearing tickets, we were building flows that looked more like product features.”

They didn’t have an AI team when they started. Now they have three people focused almost entirely on optimizing and expanding Forethought. Most of their time goes into building backend workflows complex enough to give the AI more ways to help. Every time Autoflows can take a new action, the system gets faster, deflection goes up, and agents get more time back.

That compounding effect is what made Autoflows so valuable, and it became the reason they needed a full AI program in the first place.

Assist turned AI from a tool into a daily habit in Slack

Most teams begin using AI to assist agents in handling tickets. That’s what ActiveCampaign did with Assist, a browser extension that lives inside Zendesk. It provides agents with fast access to ticket history, summaries, and suggested actions, enabling them to respond with less context switching and less guesswork. However, the bigger shift occurred when they began using Ace to support internal teams as well. The ActiveCampaign team set up Solve for Slack, because Slack is where most of the team already spends their day. That decision mattered. It meant people didn’t have to go looking for help. When a team member needed answers, they could simply ask in Slack and get answers in a thread immediately.

Now, people across the company use Ace to access account context, product documentation, past tickets, and technical guidance—all from Slack, without needing to switch tools. Today, Solve in Slack handles four times the volume of the internal widget because it’s faster and easier than any other option.

“Having Solve in Slack has been a real unlock. Since Slack is where most people spend their day, being able to surface answers directly there has been hugely impactful. And with autoflows, we can build lightweight workflows that help people act on those answers immediately.”

Making Ace available in Slack made it normal to ask the AI for help, whether someone needed customer context, technical guidance, or just a faster way to find answers.

RESULTS

Forethought helped ActiveCampaign reduce volume and save time

When ActiveCampaign launched Solve, the impact was immediate. Although overall ticket volume has increased with the business, the number of tickets reaching agents is down 40% from the baseline. Deflection now holds steady at +60% and it hasn’t dropped.

Internally, Solve became the team’s fastest-moving tool. The internal Solve widget and Solve in Slack now handle about 1,300 chats per week, with Solve in Slack accounting for roughly 1,000 of those. Most are resolved in under two minutes. Multiply that across the team, and Forethought is saving the equivalent of over five full workdays every week.

Key results:

• +60% chat deflection using Solve Chat
• +50% fewer Zendesk chats reaching agents
• 1,300 internal Solve chats per week (1,000+ in Slack)
• 5+ full workdays saved weekly through Solve

That level of adoption speaks for itself. Solve, Autoflows, and Assist made AI a natural part of how the customer team works. AI runs in the background, doing its job, and giving human agents space to do theirs.

‍

FUTURE

The next step is customer intelligence at scale

Forethought changed how ActiveCampaign handled support tickets and also altered the team's structure. Phil started in customer experience. Now, he leads a dedicated AI program team—two full-time AI analysts dedicated to building and refining workflows, optimizing Assist and Autoflows, and integrating support tools across the business to drive efficiency and better decision-making. Their job has shifted from owning outcomes to enabling intelligence across the company.

They now act as internal consultants, partnering closely with all teams that are building their own AI solutions and are not sure where to start. The work this team does, including researching and building workflows in Forethought, leveraging its AI features and powerful Action Builder, enables close collaboration with the product team.

For example, when the AI program team began exploring workflows using Action Builder to pull data from Snowflake, they connected with the product team to understand how they were solving a similar problem in ActiveCampaign’s customer-facing product. That alignment helped both teams share learnings, avoid duplication, and inform future development.

It’s a collaborative relationship that helps surface new use cases and shape a long-term strategy focused on driving real outcomes.

"If you’re starting with Forethought, I would advise first talking to the teams who will benefit most from its implementation, usually your customer-facing teams. They know the real pain points customers experience day to day. If you're focused on internal use cases, have conversations about where processes tend to break down or get bottlenecked. Go into them, thinking anything is possible!

These conversations, which should happen early and often, are crucial to shape your strategy and your roadmap. At the end of the day, the real value isn’t in just building something clever; it’s in building something clever that actually improves outcomes."

Looking ahead, they’re focused on customer intelligence. Deflection is strong, but the goal now is to make every part of the org more efficient, from customer success to sales and marketing. That means enriching the data behind every interaction and using AI to surface what matters most in real time.

Forethought started as a support solution. Now, it informs the product, shapes strategy, and gives every team a clearer view of the customer at ActiveCampaign.

‍