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Retail

Cutting WhatsApp support response time by 87% for a Joburg retailer

AI-powered WhatsApp Business support that triages 8,000+ enquiries a month and lifts conversion 22% without a single junior agent.

Client
NorthStar Retail
Location
Johannesburg, SA
Duration
9 weeks
Published
26 Apr 2026
The challenge

What we walked into

NorthStar's customer support team was drowning in WhatsApp messages — eight to nine thousand a month, peaking at five hundred a day around payday weekends. Response times stretched past four hours, sale enquiries timed out, and conversion was bleeding to faster competitors.

Our approach

How we tackled it

We mapped every common enquiry into intent buckets, built a retrieval-augmented agent on top of NorthStar's product catalogue and policy docs, and wired it into WhatsApp Business via Twilio. The agent answers product, sizing, stock-availability and order-tracking questions instantly. Anything ambiguous, anything money-related, gets routed to a human with full conversation context attached.

The outcome

What changed

Median response time dropped from 4h 12m to under 33 seconds. Sale conversion off WhatsApp lifted 22% in the first eight weeks. Two of the three previously-overwhelmed support staff now focus on retention and outbound — net-positive headcount.

By the numbers

Results that paid for the work

  • 87% reduction in median response time
  • 22% lift in sale conversion
  • 60% of enquiries resolved without human escalation
  • R 480k annualised support cost saving
Sitect rebuilt our entire e-commerce stack and added an AI assistant that now handles 60% of our customer queries. Conversion is up 38% and our support team finally sleeps at night.
— Thandi Mokoena, CEO, NorthStar Retail

Technologies used

Twilio WhatsApp BusinessOpenAI GPT-4oLaravel + Redispgvector RAG

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