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.
By mid-2025, Khoros's support backlog looked like a ski slope pointed the wrong way:
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.
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.
Issues get routed instantly while repetitive problems auto-resolve. No more agents wasting time sorting through cases.
Instead of escalating all to L2, L1 agents learned to handle select L2 issues. This stops the bottleneck before it happens.
Dedicated sprints with clear burn-down goals. Everyone knew exactly how many tickets to eliminate each week.
The rollout was refreshingly smooth. Kayako One handled the entire migration and AI setup.
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.
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.
