How Freshy scaled support without adding headcount and turned it into a driver of sales pipeline and SEO growth

When Nick Paliughi became Director of Support at Freshy, he inherited a helpdesk managing over 2,800 websites. A mixture of sites the agency built, migrated, or acquired. 

With that many clients, support requests poured in daily. Some were urgent, like broken checkout flows on WooCommerce stores, while others were simple, like a small business asking for a text update. But every ticket looked the same when it arrived in the queue.

“Our agents were constantly asking questions in chat or digging through Asana for context,” Nick said. “We had no way to prioritize or surface insights quickly. It felt like the dark ages.”

Freshy needed a way to bring context, prioritization, and intelligence into every ticket without slowing down their team. That’s where Zapier and AI came in. 

FreshySites’ results, by the numbers:

• Support scaled to cover 2,800+ active sites without growing headcount

• Hours saved every week on ticket triage and context gathering

• Faster, more accurate prioritization for urgent, high-value clients

• New sales opportunities detected directly from support conversations

• Dozens of SEO-friendly blog articles generated from dev fixes

Smarter triage with AI

Every incoming Help Scout ticket used to be a blank slate. Support agents had to decide urgency, look up account details in Asana, and flag high-value clients manually. The result was inconsistent service and wasted time.

With Zapier, FreshySites built a smarter intake process with AI and automation handling the heavy lifting. Zapier pulls in data from Asana, Clockify, and Help Scout, layering in AI to provide summaries, sentiment checks, and context. Each new ticket is now scanned with AI for:

• Sentiment analysis: frustrated or urgent messages are flagged immediately.

• High-value client check: identifies priority accounts or newly launched sites.

• Recurring issues: detects if the client’s request references past tickets.

• Missing info: pulls URLs, credentials, and other details automatically from Asana.

Tickets for high-value clients or urgent issues are escalated automatically, while low-priority requests get handled appropriately.

The difference is night and day. “Automation freed up our cognitive space,” Nick says. “Our team isn’t bogged down in manual triage. They can focus on delivering great support.”

Spotting sales opportunities inside support

Before automation, sales opportunities often slipped through the cracks. A client might ask about something sales-related, but those insights rarely reached the team.

Freshy solved this by layering AI onto its ticket workflows. Every ticket is scanned for signals that could indicate an upsell opportunity, such as PCI compliance needs, advanced service tiers, or additional security add-ons. If flagged, Zapier routes the opportunity to the sales team for follow-up.

The result? Support agents focus on resolving the issue, while sales get a steady pipeline of warm leads. “Zapier gave us a way to detect opportunities we would’ve missed,” Nick said. “Support became a revenue driver.”

Turning solved issues into SEO content

Behind the scenes, Freshy’s developers constantly fix tricky WordPress issues. But those solutions lived only in Asana tickets, invisible to prospects searching online for help.

Nick’s team saw an opportunity: what if solved issues could double as marketing content? Using Zapier, they built a workflow that activates when a developer task is completed. AI analyzes the task to see if it’s broadly applicable, like fixing plugin conflicts or optimizing a theme. If so, it generates a draft blog article complete with keywords, plugin names, and replication steps.

The content is reviewed and published on Freshy's resources hub. The automation has already produced dozens of articles, expanding its SEO footprint.

“It takes internal fixes and turns them into useful, search-optimized content,” Nick said. “We help more people solve WordPress issues while attracting new business.”

Results beyond efficiency

Zapier empowered Freshy to scale support, streamline operations, and even create new growth channels. As Nick puts it, “The time before setting this up felt like the dark ages. Now, automation gives us the clarity and capacity we need to support thousands of clients and keep growing. Zapier showed us we can use AI creatively, not just to work faster, but to add real business value."

Nick Paliughi is a 2025 Zappy Awards winner in the Customer Support Automator of the Year category.