Founded in the UK, Mention Me is a SaaS referral marketing platform that helps brands find their strongest customer voices and put them to work. When a customer clicks "refer a friend" on a website with millions of loyal customers, there's a good chance Mention Me's technology is running in the background.

Behind the scenes, the support operation handles 20,000 tickets a year. But there’s a complication: Mention Me supports two completely different audiences.

Their clients. Global brands running referral programs contact Mention Me to submit complex operational requests. A global sportswear brand needs 30 campaign offers rebuilt, translated into four languages, and live before Black Friday. 

Their clients' customers. At the same time, customers of that brand might reach out to ask about the status of their reward for a friend that they referred.

The queue ran through a lean in-house team based in the UK. All email, all manual, all handled internally. The team was good, with 96% CSAT, but the model had a natural ceiling. Every new client meant more tickets, and more tickets meant more headcount.

Carl Turner, Director of Customer Success Operations at Mention Me, knew AI was the answer. He also knew that getting it wrong wasn't an option. 

AI + Human CX

Mention Me activated Crescendo's AI + human model across email. Their AI persona, Charlie, handles incoming inquiries the moment they arrive, giving clients and their customers fast, on-brand responses without touching Mention Me's internal team.

For complex requests, Charlie routes to a human agent. For everything else, it's handled on the spot.

Now, 78% of tickets are resolved without a single person on the Mention Me team getting involved. The internal ops team, freed from the queue, can sit closer to the product team and turn frontline customer insight into platform improvements.

Results at a Glance

• 78% of tickets outsourced or automated
• 96% CSAT maintained
• 99.3% SLA compliance
• 97% QA score against Mention Me's own quality framework
• 30-minute full resolution time (down from two hours)

"At first, I was nervous because it seemed too good to be true. But Crescendo delivered what you set out to deliver, and beyond what I expected."
_{Carl Turner, Director of Customer Success Operations}

Trust is hard to build, easy to break

Brands stake their referral programs and their customers' experience on Mention Me's platform. One bad support interaction and the ripple starts.

A shopper clicks refer a friend, gets a broken link, and a support response that takes three days. That same shopper encounters another refer-a-friend program on a different brand's site a week later. They remember. They don't click. And every person they would have referred stays a stranger to the brand. 

Carl knew the stakes. At the same time, Mention Me was growing. New clients meant more tickets, more complexity, and more strain on a team already being pulled toward product work and higher-value commitments. The in-house model that had delivered 96% CSAT could buckle under its own success.

Hiring was the obvious lever. But more headcount would address the volume without touching the underlying problem. The team needed to get out of the queue, not dig deeper into it.

‍

Why Crescendo?

Carl looked at Zendesk's native AI, but Mention Me's ticket profile made it a non-starter. Rewriting responses and surfacing articles didn't help when the ticket required someone to go into the platform and build something.

Mention Me needed AI that could handle the simple end of the queue and a skilled human team that could handle the rest. 

When Crescendo came across his desk, Carl did what any careful operator would do. He started asking around. Peers who had been through similar implementations with other providers had horror stories. Clients left waiting. Quality scores that fell off a cliff in the first month. Support teams that never fully handed off because the provider couldn't be trusted to get it right.

So Carl came in with a list of requirements. Lots of requirements. Crescendo replied with a working demo built on Mention Me's documentation. Carl could see exactly how AI would handle real inquiries, in real time, before a single client interaction had taken place. For a team that had spent months thinking through every possible way AI could go wrong, seeing it work was the turning point.

"We almost thought it was a bit too good to be true,” Carl said. “We were like, what's the catch?"

Pricing sealed it. Crescendo's outcome-based model meant shared risk, predictable costs, and a supplier whose incentives aligned with theirs. The Crescendo team also modeled multiple scenarios across geographies, service hours, and operational changes. Carl knew exactly what he'd spend, and exactly what he could do if his business needs changed.

“Crescendo’s pricing model significantly reduced the perceived risk of our transformation. We've valued knowing our supplier has 'skin in the game,' a business that is commercially motivated to deliver excellence for our customers in every interaction.”
_{Carl Turner, Director of Customer Success Operations}

Meet Charlie, Mention Me's always-on expert

As the project took shape, Mention Me made a deliberate choice. Their AI would have a name, a consistent voice, and a presence clients could recognize. No generic chatbots allowed. They landed on “Charlie.” But Charlie wasn't going near a client until Carl was sure it could deliver against Mention Me expectations.

The team invested heavily in the groundwork. Documentation was updated, training materials were built, and every AI response was QA'ed line by line.

Carl expected to run this work with support from one or two people at Crescendo. He got an entire team. Owen on AI configuration and triage. Ashley guiding the deployment process. Alexis on the customer success side, keeping everything on track. And behind them, skilled technical agents trained on Mention Me's platform and ready to handle whatever Charlie couldn't.

When they were confident in the setup, the rollout began deliberately and in stages, starting with the simplest ticket categories. Each phase had to prove itself and pass a self-imposed “quality gate” before the next one opened up.

Even with the cautiously thorough approach, the rollout completed on time, against the plan Carl had committed to his CEO.

"The Crescendo team is an extension of our team, and that's been really, really nice."
_{Carl Turner, Director of Customer Success Operations}

Same scores, stronger operation

The true test came when Mention Me's Platinum clients, their highest-value accounts, came online. These were the relationships Carl had been most careful to protect. The ones where a single bad interaction carried the most weight. Nothing broke, and they continued to be delighted.

Mention Me's quality scores continue to hold exactly where they've always been. 96% CSAT. 99.3% SLA compliance. Resolution time dropped from two hours at launch to 30 minutes three months later. Charlie even scored 97% against Mention Me's quality framework.

At a recent company all-hands, Carl asked the room who had received complaints from their clients since Crescendo went live. Not a single hand went up.

"There's been no noise about this,” Carl said. “It's been really quiet in a lot of ways. And that’s the biggest win."

Carl protected Mention Me’s customer experience. Then he started finding new ways to improve it. At a Crescendo Live event, Carl spent ten minutes in the AI Insights dashboard and walked away with something he’d never been able to build before. A Product Improvement overview that uncovered exactly when passwords weren't resetting, accounts were getting locked, and two-factor authentication was failing. The report went straight to his product team.

At Mention Me, email is running smoothly, and chat is next. Plus, when Mention Me is ready to grow into new markets, the infrastructure scales with them. Multilingual support, new geographies, expanded service hours, and no new team to stand up.

Mention Me brought in AI and handed off 78% of their queue. Clients never felt a thing.

With Charlie handling most of the queue, Mention Me's internal ops team can finally focus on feeding product with frontline insights, shaping platform improvements, and doing the strategic work that doesn't fit in a ticket.

Carl’s only regret: "If I were to run this again, I probably would've been less cautious on our side, and probably we could have gone quicker." His team walked in skeptical and walked out advocates. 

Word of mouth is Mention Me's business. Crescendo is now part of the story they tell.