The Situation
Great food gets customers in the door. Great service keeps them there.
That's the reality Calo operates in every day. Founded to make healthy eating effortless, Calo delivers personalized meal plans to hundreds of thousands of customers across the Middle East and the UK. At that scale, ensuring fresh, daily meals built around each person's goals, the team behind the experience matters just as much as the food itself.
Calo's operations team of ~70 customer experience associates handles everything from welcome calls for new subscribers to win-back campaigns for customers on the verge of churning. They follow up on live interactions, resolve failed delivery issues, and conduct customer interviews to inform product decisions. It's a broad remit, and it demands a platform that can keep up.
Their previous provider didn’t make the final cut. With key integrations with tools the team relied on daily, like Intercom and Zendesk, customer experience associates had to jump between platforms to piece together a single customer interaction. For a team sometimes managing multiple clients simultaneously, that kind of friction added up fast. And without the proper tools to help supervisors skim calls or spot trends, oversight was manual and time-consuming.
The pricing wasn't working either. As the team grew, costs scaled in the wrong direction. Something had to change.
The Solution
The initial reason to explore Maqsam was straightforward enough: the team was curious about its AI capabilities. To evaluate the system, they implemented the comprehensive Maqsam customer service software and began testing quietly alongside their existing setup.
That’s when everything shifted. Beyond the AI agent, Maqsam’s customer service software offered sentiment analysis, AI-powered call transcripts that made it easy to skim a call in seconds, and most critically, in-portal integrations with both Intercom and Zendesk. For a team whose entire workflow runs through those tools, this wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the thing they hadn't realised they were missing.
With Maqsam, a customer experience associate could pull up a customer's full history, read the AI transcript of their last call, and dial them directly without leaving the platform. The tab-switching stopped. The context-switching stopped. The workflow that had always felt unnecessarily complicated suddenly felt simple.
"The first group of customer experience associates to try Maqsam loved it so much, we decided to accelerate the whole rollout." –Mahdi Ali, VP of Customer Experience, Calo Inc. |
Call quality was another factor that quietly won the team over. When your customer experience associates are handling onboarding calls, win-back conversations, and delivery issues back to back, a dropped word or a crackling line is an inconvenience that undermines the entire interaction. With 96% of calls rated good quality or higher against industry-standard MOS scores, Calo's team could focus on the conversation, not the connection.
The plan had been to onboard gradually, over several weeks. But the early testers were so enthusiastic that the timeline was minimized. What was designed as a careful, phased migration turned into a swift, team-wide switch driven entirely by the team's own momentum.
The Impact
The switch to Maqsam wasn't about the bottom line, but about the workflow. AI transcripts, sentiment analysis, and a native Intercom integration gave the team capabilities their previous setup simply couldn't match.
Once customer experience associates could read a full call transcript, see a customer's chat history, and dial them directly without switching tabs, the decision had already been made.
The cost reduction that followed was significant, but it felt more like a reward than a reason. And when the Maqsam team proactively restructured pricing as Calo's customer experience team count grew, it only reinforced what the team already knew: they'd made the right call.
The Outcome
Today, Calo's team works from a single platform, and the difference is felt every day.
There's also a broader lesson in how this transition unfolded. Calo had been aware of Maqsam for years but had been sitting comfortably with their existing solution. The platform had evolved considerably in that time, and their advice to other businesses in a similar position: don't let familiarity with your current vendor stop you from looking. The tool you learned about three years ago might be exactly what your team needs today.
For Calo, the moment they made the switch to Maqsam, they knew it was the right call. While the initial transition was sparked by curiosity regarding Maqsam's AI capabilities, the ultimate decision to consolidate their contact center operations was driven by a more comprehensive set of benefits that resonated across the entire 70-person team.
The switch didn't just optimize their operations; it provided a platform that the team genuinely loves using to deliver effortless, healthy eating experiences to hundreds of thousands of customers.
