How Ashley Furniture is building better CX through automation and AI
There’s no point in displaying furniture in a beautiful showroom if things get ugly once you bring an item home.
A customer might have accidentally chosen the wrong color or style. A chair or desk can get damaged in transit. No matter what kind of furniture they buy, there’s always a risk of messing up when it comes time to assemble it.
For Pete Petrocelli, head of technology and AI at the North Eastern branch of Ashley Furniture, what happens next should reflect the same degree of thought and care that a retailer puts into the showroom that attracted customers in the first place.
“Consistency is key,” said Petrocelli, speaking in a session at a virtual conference hosted by Freshworks this week. “We want to provide a good experience to the customer before a sale happens, post-sale, post-delivery and even a couple of months down the road.”
That level of consistency requires automation, and Petrocelli cited Asheley NE’s adoption of Freshworks’ applications as a move that eliminated a lot of ad hoc processes.
Ashley NE
“We didn’t even really have (support) tickets,” he admitted. “Customers would email into an address, or they might text in with another system that we had previously used. Freshdesk Omni has allowed us to bring everything under one umbrella, so we have visibility on all customer issues in a single environment.”
Customers might still call or e-mail in with their issues, Petrocelli said, but the platform will convert messages into tickets and route calls to the appropriate support team. Ashley NE has took a step further by building an integration to tie the Freshworks solution to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point of sale (POS) systems. This allows support staff to tap into essential data such as the products a customer purchased so they can offer help more readily.
As both generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) create new opportunities in customer experience (CX) design, Petrocelli said Ashley NE is starting out by solidifying the knowledge base its support team uses to help serve customers. From there, he said the company was developing an agent assist-style tool to help them pull that knowledge and add in context that would improve outcomes.
From there, Ashley will look at how AI could offer customers more self-service options, which could deflect some of the activity currently going into its support team, particularly what he described as level zero or level one issues. That kind of AI experience needs to be as carefully designed as everyday furniture, he suggested.
“As you start thinking about having the chat-based AI agents and then potentially some kind of voice capability, it’s important to ensure the customer feels like it’s a personalized experience to some extent,” he said. “And it has to feel warm.”
Petrocelli’s session at Refresh 2025, which also featured a CX professional from People.com, is now available for on-demand viewing for those who register on the Freshworks website.
