July 17, 2025
Hobbycraft gets Crafty With AI and Freshworks for Smarter Customer Service
At Freshworks’ recent Refresh Europe event in London, heralding the launch of the new and improved Agentic Freddy AI, CXM interviewed Simon Birch from Hobbycraft, a UK arts and craft retail chain, to see how AI and cloud fit into the fun but highly traditional world of stitching and papercraft.
How does AI benefit a highly traditional business like Hobbycraft?
As you may know, Hobbycraft has over 35,000 different products across our 100+ retail stores, which is still the biggest part of our business. Having interactions with a customer is not just about what product they are looking for, but often requests like ‘this is my project, can you help me?’ are deeply complex.
So, trying to do that digitally has been a challenge for me, but AI is helping fill that gap now, because it will look at a huge database of knowledge and look at the website and can then have that conversation with a customer.
I don’t think our customers sometimes realise that they aren’t talking to a human. If you flip that onto the agent support side of things, they’re also served with the same information. The AI makes a lot of my agents product experts, by proxy, because it is helping to fill that information instantly.
Okay, most of this interaction goes through the website, or is AI venturing into your stores?
Not yet, but I am looking at that. It’s moving from digitally from the website by chat, initially, but now through any contact channel, they can respond that way. And I’m looking at how can I go full circle and go back to our stores where the whole idea and the whole concept started from an interaction point of view. That’s to see if staff in-store have got any knowledge gaps, how can they interact digitally with the same function, same service and ask wider questions to get answers immediately for customers.
How do you track interactions between your typical Hobbycrafter and the system for customer support, feedback and service?
So I think any concept or query that comes into us is categorised and tagged So I can see quick trends. On a very large scale and I can dig into those individually. I think the power that’s coming from an AI insight’s point of view will just give me the depth to be able to draw down further, or answer those customer questions before I ask them, in essence.
So I think that’s what I’m looking for is something that spots a trend before I go looking for it.
How does Freshworks help Hobbycraft with reputation management?
One of our reputations is we are very strong on service and we do truly care about our customers. I know every company will say that, but I’m confident that we do.
I think all of my agents give great service digitally or via telephone, whichever channel you choose, or in-store I think this has just supercharged them. So, it’s the case that AI will never replace that human interaction, but it will supercharge it.
And we’ve seen customer satisfaction lift by 5%, just because Freddy AI is rewriting or improving what our colleagues have traditionally responded to our customers, but with the same intentions.
I’m asking how can I get my agents to add value where they need to? And the quick easy win is that they can be automated 24/7 with AI. When we take that noise away, they can then spend the time really adding value for the business.
A couple of examples of that value are big ticket purchases, they want confidence in the product, they want a discussion about that product, or they want help and guidance in order to purchase to check out. I think that’s where my team can get involved. We’ve done some research, where my team are involved online, our customers are five times more likely to check out. So, obviously it adds value to our customers and from a business point of view, adds value to the bottom line there. It is hugely productive when they have that interaction.
So, I’m not going to scale up my customer service resource, but I think I can make it more efficient by using AI as the additional person.
Is there any particular kind of moment where Freddy has done something beneficial, that the team or yourself perhaps weren’t expecting?
I think just the speed that it will find detailed answers, especially around the quirky questions around our products. That used to have to take an in-person conversation internally in the team between our support and our product content, or even back to our suppliers. That whole journey used to take time whereas now, I can do that in seconds.
So, some of the details that are coming out of that interaction with AI just saves what used to be days worth of waiting for one of our factories to go to our suppliers, to come back to us. Now we get a resolution so quickly.
And is there anything in particular you’re looking to use with glee and excitement?
Having conversations with Agentic AI will be a game changer. Conversational AI with actions – this is going to be the next big shift. If the system knows what the problem is and knows what to do and does it, again, it just takes another step away from my agents.
So, I think again, this is just freeing up more time. From our contact centre, I think predominantly 60% of work is online order delivery issues, working with our delivery partners – finding out who you are, what your order problem is, finding out who the courier is, contacting the courier, when’s the next delivery slot?
If all of those interactions can be done in an instant, it just frees up more time. And it opens the door to when we could do this across any channel rather than just digitally, we could go a step further than that.
As a business how easy have you found Freshworks to use?
When we onboarded their products, I didn’t have my IT team’s support. They were supportive but they weren’t hands-on. So I did that myself just before COVID when we adopted Freshworks.
From a sales point of view, it’s very well received. I think it highlighted the impact the customer service function has on the business, because it was very heightened at that point in time. So, I think the leadership noticed that we’d gone from a thousand tickets daily to 5,000 tickets a day. That’s a massive increase, but it gave us the flexibility in a system that’s easy to pull in extra teams from all over the business to help respond to that.
I’m not going to say we delivered exceptional service during that time, but we delivered very good service compared to a lot of other retailers. So I’m proud of the agility of the team, and therefore their use of the system together.
