How We Used AI to Read 50,000 Customer Emails

Coronavirus has cut a large and uneven swathe through the world’s businesses. While some fields — hospitality, transportation, restaurants — have been crushed, other fields — grocery delivery, e-commerce — have been crushed in a very different way: with too much demand from sheltering consumers. This is the story of how Tolstoy, a NLP company based in San Francisco, helped an online garden retailer handle a massive inflow of customer emails as they waged their way through the pandemic.

Pandemic-level demand

While some businesses have seen their demand dry up overnight, other businesses have experienced record inflow. One of the activities consumers stuck at home have turned to is gardening. Garden retailers both in the US and Europe have seen orders skyrocket hundreds, or thousands, in percent growth.

One of these garden retailers approached Tolstoy with a dilemma. The coronavirus spigot had sent them several times more orders than they had capacity to fulfill. Correspondingly, they had received over 50,000 customer emails since the start of March — most of them angry emails inquiring on order status.

The company usually routed customer inquires through Freshdesk, an email platform, that helped categorize inbound mail. But now they were receiving correspondence from many…