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Success Story

From Salesforce to Kayako One: How Khoros Cut Their Spend by 450K and Backlog by 19%

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For years, Khoros watched their support backlog climb for 20 straight weeks. Then it dropped 19% in 8 weeks. They didn't hire more people. They didn't work weekends. They didn't outsource. They asked a different question entirely.

Can we eliminate repetitive tickets instead of handling it?

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The Problem (That Everyone Pretends Doesn't Exist)

By mid-2025, Khoros's support backlog looked like a ski slope pointed the wrong way:

657 Tickets
4 weeks before implementing Kayako One
1,363 Tickets
2 weeks before (that's a 107% jump)

Everything landed in L1 and stayed there. Average response times stretched from hours to days. Agents got frustrated. Customers waited. The leadership team was tired of "managing" the backlog. They wanted to eliminate it.

The Shift: Zero-Backlog Thinking

Most vendors pitched faster routing and prettier dashboards — incremental improvements to the same broken system. Kayako One pitched elimination: AI triage, cross-skilled agents, and targeted backlog sprints.

AI-Driven Ticket Triage

Issues get routed instantly while repetitive problems auto-resolve. No more agents wasting time sorting through cases.

Cross-Skilled L1 Agents

Instead of escalating all to L2, L1 agents learned to handle select L2 issues. This stops the bottleneck before it happens.

Backlog Blitz Weeks

Dedicated sprints with clear burn-down goals. Everyone knew exactly how many tickets to eliminate each week.

Implementation in 3 days: No Drama, No Downtime

The rollout was refreshingly smooth. Kayako One handled the entire migration and AI setup.

  • The switch took just 3 weeks.
  • A four-person team, each at half capacity, handled the move.
  • Support fully exited Salesforce, while Sales and Renewals shifted to Trilogy’s instance.
  • About 40,000 tickets and the entire knowledge base made the jump.
  • Tickets were exported from Salesforce in JSON and bulk-imported into Kayako One. Kayako One was live on Day 1, resolving 50% of tickets in the first week.
  • The support footprint dropped from 67 people to 34 ; a 49% cut in seats.
  • Agents completed their training in a single day. Customers experienced zero downtime. And nobody worked weekends to make it happen.

Implementation was a breeze

  • Set up in ~3 weeks by a 4-person team (50% allocation).
  • Migrated ~40,000 Salesforce tickets and the entire knowledge base. 
  • Import ran under a 60 tickets/hour cap (later patched), but Kayako One was enabled from Day 1 
  • Hit~50% auto-resolution in the first week of live use.

The Numbers That Matter

Metric Before Kayako One After 8 Weeks Change
L1 Backlog 1,363 tickets 1,105 tickets ↓ 19%
Resolution Time ~3.5 days <1 day ↓ 70%
Agent Time per Ticket ~3 hours ~1.5 hours ↓ 50%
First-Touch Resolution 62% 81% ↑ 31%
CSAT 78% 91% ↑ 13 points

Wish your CS dashboard looked like this?

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Why It Actually Worked

  • AI was now handling all the repetitive grunt work. 
  • What used to take agents several minutes of manual triage now happened automatically in seconds. 
  • Agents could focus on actually solving problems instead of sorting them. Cross-training eliminated the escalation bottleneck. 
  • When L1 agents can resolve issues that previously required L2 handoffs, tickets move faster and customers get answers sooner. 
  • Visible weekly goals kept the entire team motivated. Everyone could see the backlog number dropping week by week, which maintained momentum through the entire 8-week transformation.
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The impact was hard to ignore: 

49% drop in seats
70% faster time-to-resolution
19% backlog reduction in 8 weeks
Growth of +13 CSAT points

 ~all without weekend overtime or customer downtime.

Result: A 20-week climbing trend reversed and stayed down.

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$885K Salesforce Spend Avoided as AI Handles Half the Work.

Khoros cut ties with Salesforce for Support. 

The old Salesforce bill ran $885,789 a year—and that was across teams. Support’s share of that spend disappeared with Kayako One. 

Add a –49% seat cut and Kayako One resolving half of tickets, and the savings went far beyond licenses.

The Real Win, though?

However, the biggest change for the Khoros team was in their outlook. Khoros team stopped thinking of backlog as "the cost of doing business." Now every new workflow is designed with elimination in mind, not management.

When you change the question from "How do we handle this backlog?" to "How do we prevent this backlog?" everything shifts.

19% backlog reduction. 70% faster resolution. +13 CSAT points.

Without adding headcount or working weekends. That's what happens when you stop managing problems and start eliminating them.

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Let’s make it happen for you

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