How Kestrel handled complex escalations without growing its help desk
Kestrel1 week
From signup to live
73%
Issues resolved without a human
3min
Avg. handoff time when escalated
0
Additional support hires
At a glance
Kestrel's five-person team supported hardware used by crews in the field, where a wrong answer could mean a truck roll. They needed an agent that knew exactly when to stop guessing.
They trained the xFlow HelpDesk agent on their troubleshooting guides and wired it to escalate automatically — with the full conversation and diagnosis attached — whenever a case needed a technician.
The agent now resolves routine troubleshooting on its own and hands off anything ambiguous with enough context that the technician never has to ask the customer to repeat themselves.
“It's not trying to be a hero on the hard cases. It knows its limits, and that's exactly what let us trust it with the easy ones.”
Dana Osei
Founder, Kestrel
A wrong answer in the field was expensive
Kestrel's five-person team supports hardware used by crews doing utility inspections, where a bad troubleshooting step doesn't just waste time, it can mean a truck roll to a site that's hours away. Live chat coverage around the clock was never realistic for a team that size.
"We didn't need something that sounded confident. We needed something that knew exactly where its knowledge ended," Dana Osei, Kestrel's founder, said. A generic chatbot guessing at a diagnosis was worse than no chatbot at all.
An agent built to hand off, not to bluff
Kestrel trained the xFlow HelpDesk agent on its troubleshooting guides and wired it to escalate automatically the moment a case moved past what those guides covered, passing along the full conversation and diagnosis so a technician never has to ask a customer to repeat themselves.
The agent now resolves the routine troubleshooting on its own, and it escalates cleanly and quickly for everything else, which turned out to matter more to Kestrel's customers than raw resolution rate.
“It's not trying to be a hero on the hard cases. It knows its limits, and that's exactly what let us trust it with the easy ones.”
Dana Osei
Founder, Kestrel
The results
Live in one week. From signup to a working agent trained on Kestrel's own troubleshooting docs.
73% of issues resolved without a human. Routine troubleshooting now resolves in the chat, not in a queue.
3-minute average handoff time when escalated. Technicians get the full context immediately, instead of starting the conversation over.
Zero additional support hires. A five-person team is covering a volume of inbound questions it couldn't have staffed for otherwise.
What’s next
Kestrel is now extending the agent's troubleshooting guides to cover its newest hardware line before it ships, so day-one support is ready before the first unit reaches a crew.
“You don't need a big team behind this. You need your troubleshooting docs to actually be good, and the agent does the rest.”
Dana Osei
Founder, Kestrel
About
Kestrel builds field hardware for utility inspection crews.
Industry
HelpDesk / Hardware
Size
1-10
Founded
2022
xFlow plan
Starter Agent
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