Lixum

Case study

RUN-TIGER d.o.o.·Automatic coop doorsrun-chicken.com

They cancelled the helpdesk. The support got better.

a month, was €360: ~€20
of first emails answered without a human: ~95%
to first reply, was 9⁠–⁠12 hours: 1–2 min

a month on support tooling

€360

the only time anyone answered

Office hours

to first reply

9⁠–⁠12 h

Chapters

Chapter 01: The problem

A support bill that didn't buy coverage

RUN-CHICKEN ships automatic coop doors across Europe and North America. A door that fails to close at dusk puts live animals at risk, and the company promises help around the clock: support is part of the product.

That support ran on Zoho CRM at about €360 a month. It bought a ticketing system, but not coverage: the bill grew with every seat, and none of the seats answered at night.

Before

€360

per month (€4,320 a year), priced per seat, business hours only

Overnight and weekend email waited until morning

Cost grew with every seat added, not with resolutions

The knowledge base sat apart from the inbox

Chapter 02: The rebuild

Move it in-house, change nothing for the customer

We put Chatwoot, an open-source CRM, on a private server and connected their existing Gmail support address through Google Cloud. Customers noticed nothing: same address, same replies, no migration to announce.

n8n on the same machine runs the automation without a second subscription. The help-centre articles went into Pinecone, so the agent answers from RUN-CHICKEN's own documentation rather than a general model's guesses; and with Grok each answer is cheap enough that answering everything beats triaging it.

The path a message takes

Customer email arrives in Gmail

Chatwoot, self-hosted

n8n workflow, same server

Pinecone, holding their own documentation

Grok drafts, or hands to a human

One queue for Email, Instagram, WhatsApp

Chapter 03: What else it can do

Nothing about it is finished

The support system is not a product with a plan and a feature list. It is custom work: we built the routing, the rules and the agent ourselves, on a server RUN-CHICKEN owns. n8n is just the toolkit, reaching over 2,000 services and anything with an API.

So extending it is work rather than a purchase: a connection that would be a sales conversation somewhere else is an afternoon here. And support is only the first stage: on the same foundations, a much larger custom system for RUN-CHICKEN is already taking shape.

Gmail, their existing support address
Instagram and WhatsApp, in the same queue
Their own help-centre documentation
Grok, drafting and answering
Drafting help for the humans, in the same inbox

The agent answers first contact only. Anything outside the documentation goes to a named person instead, quietly.

Chapter 04: Result

€360 a month, replaced by about €20

The new system runs at about €20 a month, and nine tenths of that is the server, which already carries other work. Answering around the clock costs closer to two euros a month than twenty.

The team did not shrink; its time moved. Hours that went on the same questions now go to the cases that need a person, and to work that moves the business forward.

What the subscription could never do

Reach into the order system, and any other system behind it

Answer from their own documentation, revised whenever it changes

Take a new rule the same day it is needed, not next release

Add a channel or a workflow without another licence

Still in progress

Live since March 2026 and still growing, with website chat now in testing. The results widened the engagement too: we are now building RUN-CHICKEN a custom ERP system.

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Chapter 01: The problem

A support bill that didn't buy coverage

That support ran on Zoho CRM at about €360 a month. It bought a ticketing system, but not coverage: the bill grew with every seat, and none of the seats answered at night.

Before

€360

per month (€4,320 a year), priced per seat, business hours only

Overnight and weekend email waited until morning

Cost grew with every seat added, not with resolutions

The knowledge base sat apart from the inbox

By the numbers

What changed, drawn to scale

Before and after

Metric	Before	Now
Support tooling cost	€360 a month (€4,320 a year)	~€20 a month (~€240 a year)
First reply	9⁠–⁠12 hours	1–2 minutes
Overnight and weekends	Email waited until morning	Answered around the clock
Channels	3, each on its own	1 inbox for email, Instagram and WhatsApp
Adding a connection	A sales call	An afternoon

One night in the inbox

A customer writes at 22:40: the door did not close tonight.

Before

Nobody on shift

~10 hours waitingReply 08:30

Now

Reply 22:42Email 22:40

18:0021:0000:0003:0006:0009:0012:00

An illustrative night, built from the typical response times before and after.

Out of every 100 first emails

~95 answered by the agent

~5 handed to a person

The unusual ones go to a person on purpose, like a warranty claim or a door that needs a replacement part.

Support tooling, per month

Zoho, priced per seat€360

Their own system~€20

~€340 back every month (~€4,080 a year)

Typical figures from RUN-CHICKEN’s support since March 2026.

Paying for support software that still can't answer overnight?

RUN-CHICKEN's answer was a system of their own. In a short call we look at how your support runs today and whether the same approach would fit.

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