Arbor Education learns that Zendesk AI is the right answer

Teachers should spend their time teaching students. But with more than 60 percent of school staff time consumed by non-teaching chores, tedious administrative tasks often take over the day.

Arbor Education helps teachers and school staff in the U.K. get that time back. Its cloud-based management information system (MIS) streamlines school operations by centralizing data and reducing manual administrative work.

But Arbor Education was facing its own administrative headaches. As the company scaled from supporting just over 1,000 schools to almost 10 times that number, ticket volumes spiked.

“I was looking at our growth forecasts thinking, ‘I’m going to have to either hire loads of people—or lean into tech,’” recalls Emily Dowse, Head of Support at Arbor Education. “We simply couldn’t have serviced that many schools without changing how we worked.”

A Zendesk customer since 2012, Dowse’s support team upgraded to Zendesk AI in 2023—and the results were striking. In 2024 alone, Arbor Education achieved a 35 percent reduction in tickets per school, even as its customer base ballooned from 4,000 to 10,000 schools.

Arbor Education’s Zendesk AI agent handled 132,000 conversations and escalated only 21 percent to human agents.

“AI has been a huge win,” says Dowse. “We had to embrace it—there was no way to scale otherwise. We simply couldn’t have done that with people alone.”

Streamlining support with Zendesk Voice

One of Arbor Education’s biggest pain points emerged in an otherwise unremarkable place—the telephone. As the number of schools using Arbor Education grew, so did the volume of calls from staff seeking quick help—but its phone support system wasn’t keeping pace.

“We were juggling systems that didn’t talk to each other,” says Dowse.

Their first phone solution was small and flexible, but unreliable. The next system was a large enterprise platform—powerful, but far too unwieldy for the company’s needs.

“It was completely the other side of the scale,” Dowse notes. “It was very inflexible—and the integration wasn’t great.”

The tipping point came when Arbor Education acquired a company that was already using Zendesk Voice. The benefits were immediate.

“We said, ‘Let’s just use Voice with Zendesk,’” Dowse explains. “Everything in one place, consistent reporting, no hopping between systems—and flexible enough that our internal team can make changes without needing a developer.”

Centralizing phone support within Zendesk gave Arbor Education a scalable foundation for growth. With ticketing, messaging, and voice all in the same ecosystem, agents gained the ability to see full customer histories, switch channels seamlessly, and resolve issues faster. It also strengthened reporting across channels, helping the team identify trends and respond proactively.

“Voice was the moment everything clicked,” says Dowse. “It gave us a unified experience—for our agents and for our customers—and let us build processes that actually scale.”

After upgrading, Arbor Education improved consistency, eliminated tool-switching, and created a more resilient operational backbone. Internally, the shift also freed up the customer operations team, which no longer needed to manage multiple disconnected systems.

“It was the foundation of everything we built afterward,” Dowse says. “Once we weren’t fighting our tools, we could finally focus on improving the customer experience.”

Building a self-service engine that scales

School administrators are the steady force that keep school operations on track. Behind the scenes, they make sure that everything is running smoothly so teachers can focus on teaching—and students can learn. But busy administrators often don’t have time to dig through technical instruction manuals when something goes wrong.

“We get a lot of questions from admins about troubleshooting,” Dowse explains. “That’s the section of the help center that we’ve really been trying to target with the AI we’ve implemented.”

When Dowse joined the company in 2018, its help center had just a handful of articles; today it contains more than 2,000.

“Zendesk really made our help center into a powerful self-service engine,” says Dowse. “Now, admins can quickly find answers to their technical questions—and spend more of their time making sure that schools run smoothly.”

Arbor Education’s help center supports everything from attendance processes to exam workflows, giving schools on-demand access to the knowledge they need. And Zendesk’s domain-based automation plays a key role, automatically deflecting inquiries from parents and students to protect data—and keep the Arbor Education team focused on school staff.

“Zendesk has been really helpful there because we’ve created a lot of automations that do ticket deflection,” Dowse says. “If an email is coming to us from an address that’s not a school domain, we have the AI agent respond, ‘You need to go and speak to your school directly.’”

Over time, self-service became far more than a convenience—-it became the foundation of Arbor Educations’ ability to scale.

“We’ve grown so quickly that self-service wasn’t optional,” Dowse says. “Zendesk’s help center has been transformational for us. It lets us support thousands more schools without adding thousands more tickets.”

AI that tackles complexity, not just FAQs

When Arbor Education first explored AI, the team didn’t start with complex, multi-step questions. In the first year, the focus was intentionally simple: remove the repetitive, straightforward queries that were flooding support and slowing response times. That foundation paved the way for year two, when Arbor began using AI to tackle the more intricate troubleshooting questions that once demanded significant expert time.

“It’s a reminder that you don’t have to start big when you first start with AI,” Dowse notes. “Begin with the basics, prove value quickly, and expand into deeper, more nuanced use cases as you grow.”

Using Zendesk’s AI capabilities, the team built conversational procedures that enable the AI agent to ask clarifying questions, determine the type of report needed, check two internal template libraries, and then guide customers through constructing a new report, step-by-step.

“The results have been impressive,” Dowse says. “We’re seeing 71 percent automated resolution—far exceeding the other use cases that we have on average, which sit at around 50 percent.”

The team applied the same approach to roles and permissions, another highly granular domain that can overwhelm traditional documentation.

“It would be wild to try to map every permission in every help article,” Dowse notes. “So we uploaded a master file of all roles and permissions for the AI agent to reference, giving both customers and agents immediate access to accurate, up-to-date information.”

As AI became more capable, Arbor Education created a new role to guide and govern it: a Digital Self-Service Manager. A human agent who previously worked on the first line of support now oversees everything from training data to performance metrics.

“He even follows up with personal calls to customers who leave poor satisfaction scores about the AI agent,” Dowse says. “You can’t just leave AI running and expect it to deliver on the promises you’ve made to your CEO—you have to invest time in it.”

Today, Arbor Education customers often don’t realize they’re speaking to an AI agent at all.

“The AI agent does exactly what it needs to do,” says Dowse. “It provides fast, accurate help to our customers without creating friction.”

A future built on intelligent support

With Arbor Education’s investment in AI, Dowse expects the simplest tasks to become fully automated.

“Moving forward, our human agents will have more time to do in-depth troubleshooting,” says Dowse. “They’ll devote more of their hours on things like coaching and managing complex technical journeys.”

And Dowse anticipates new roles emerging as AI deepens its reach across support, customer success, and onboarding.

“There will be roles in the next few years that don’t even exist today,” she says. “And that’s what’s exciting—AI isn’t replacing people, it’s giving us the space to grow, to specialize, and to focus on what matters for schools.”