How a SaaS company cut response times from 4 hours to 12 minutes by routing support queries through local AI.
Northstar Housing provides property management software to housing associations and local authorities. 200 employees, 800+ customers, and a support desk that handles 150-250 tickets per day. Their support team is six people. They're good at their jobs. They're also drowning.
The problem isn't volume. It's that the 70% of routine tickets block the 30% that actually need a human. A housing officer emails at 9 AM: "I can't log in." That sits in the queue behind three bug reports and a billing question. By the time someone responds at 1 PM, the housing officer has been locked out for four hours.
They tried hiring more agents (volume grew again), building a help centre (12% usage), and Intercom's AI bot (sent sensitive data through OpenAI — procurement flagged it as a data processing risk).
Foundry runs on a Mac Studio that Northstar already had for video production. It acts as a first-responder for support tickets.
When a ticket arrives: Foundry reads it, checks the knowledge base, drafts a response for routine questions, verifies identity for account-specific actions, reproduces and routes bug reports, and passes complex issues straight to a human with a summary.
Every response is a draft. A support agent sees the draft, confirms it's right, and clicks send. For routine tickets, that takes 10-15 seconds of reading — not 5 minutes of typing.
Over time, Foundry learns from the agent's edits. If the agent corrects the same thing three times, Foundry starts drafting it that way.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Response time (routine) | 4-6 hours | 12-15 minutes | -95% |
| Tickets per agent/day | 25-30 | 60-80 | 2x |
| CSAT | 68% | 91% | +23 pts |
| SLA breaches/month | 4-6 | 0 | -100% |
| API cost | £450/month | £0 (local) | -100% |
Annual impact: £35,000-45,000 in freed staff time + £5,400 in API savings + retained enterprise contracts worth £120,000/year that were at risk due to SLA breaches.
Foundry cost: £999 setup + £99/month = £2,187 first year.
Works for SaaS companies with 50+ tickets/day, B2B companies with data-sensitive clients, teams where routine tickets block complex issue resolution.