The customer
Fuse is a student housing provider across Eastern and Central Europe. It owns and runs co-living homes: private rooms and studios with shared kitchens and common spaces for students and young professionals under 35.
Most residents are international, and many are living abroad for the first time. When something goes wrong, a slow answer isn’t an inconvenience; it’s a scare.
Nobody wants to stay in the dark when they have a maintenance issue. We need to react as quickly as possible.
Kamelia Kasakova, Head of Operations, Fuse
The challenge
When Kamelia Kasakova joined Fuse as Head of Operations, support was handled by whoever had a spare minute. There was neither a dedicated team nor a system or process, just Gmail and WhatsApp. Nothing was tracked. More importantly, tickets fell through the gaps, and tenants paid for it in silence.
Unfortunately, I don't think back then our tenants were receiving the customer support they deserved and they needed.
That silence costs money. Tenants left without hot water, or without an answer, don’t renew. Kamelia knew slow support was quietly draining Fuse’s revenue.
The audit
Kamelia had years of experience in customer support, so she knew what she was looking at. During her first two weeks, she ran support herself to learn where things broke. Then she went tool-hunting: something she could set up without code, that pulled every channel into one place, and fit a startup budget without looking like it did.
Text kept coming up. It had an AI customer service agent she could add to the website, it fit the budget, and - the part that mattered most to someone handling tenant data - it felt secure and reliable.
The clear goal was to dramatically decrease first response time, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce the time our team spends resolving a ticket — so they have capacity for other work. Save time and make people happy. That was it.
The solution
Setup took a day, with most of it completed in under an hour. Kamelia loaded the knowledge base herself, without a developer, and the team picked up the rest on its own. After the Gmail chaos, the structure alone was a relief.
With everything in one inbox, Fuse could finally split the work that had been crammed into single channels. Booking questions went one way. Maintenance and support tickets, the operational core, were routed through email and handled in Text, where they could be tracked, owned, and closed.
Once setup stopped eating the team’s time, Kamelia could work on what sat underneath: how the team replied and the standardized processes that would hold up across different countries and laws.
It gave us the freedom to start thinking ahead, rather than just staying behind and putting out fires.
The result
The portfolio grew. More tenants and more tickets were handled by a team that stayed the same size. The numbers moved in the right direction anyway.
Ticket volume climbed by roughly two-thirds. Instead of slowing the team down, resolution time dropped from almost five days to under two. The wait that once stretched to weeks now closes within a day. Satisfaction followed: the share of tenants rating their support positively climbed from under a third to more than half.
For a company moving into new cities, that is what counts most. The business kept growing, and the support team didn’t have to grow with it.
When I started at Fuse, a tenant with a serious issue could wait weeks for a response. After onboarding Text, even as ticket volume grew, we got that down to a day. In our line of business, that's huge.
Scale service without scaling the support team
Fuse handled 66% more tickets with the same team while cutting resolution time by 63%. See how ChatBot’s AI customer service agent can help your team answer routine questions, organize support, and protect the customer experience as the business grows.
