Malt cuts support ticket closing time by 50% with Dust

As Europe’s leading freelance marketplace, Malt empowers companies to connect with top-tier independent talent. But with rapid growth came the challenge of managing multiple customer support tickets while keeping the customer team efficient. To streamline workflows and improve access to information, Malt partnered with Dust, embedding AI-powered assistants into daily routines and transforming the way teams work together. Malt discovered Dust was the tool they needed to solve the continuously growing pile of support tickets.

About Malt

Malt was founded in 2013 by Vincent Huguet and has grown over the decade to be Europe’s largest freelance marketplace, connecting over 800,000 freelancers with 70,000 companies across nine countries. Malt connects high-skilled freelancers with companies of all sizes seeking specific expertise, allowing businesses to tap into a vast pool of independent talent while empowering freelancers to find meaningful, tailored work.

The platform blends cutting-edge AI with a human touch, creating a matching system that efficiently pairs freelancers with projects that align with their skills and interests. This AI-powered solution is central to Malt’s vision of scaling the freelance industry.

Challenge: the growing volume of internal and external support tickets overwhelming the support team

Malt’s customer experience team, led by Sarah Rezzoug, manages all support requests spanning freelancer onboarding, billing, disputes, and legal compliance. They faced growing pressure to maintain high service quality while handling an increasing volume of support tickets. The team consists of 14 people across six countries handling all platform requests in about five different languages. 

As the company expanded across multiple countries and languages, the team encountered two main challenges: managing external customer queries and addressing internal employee questions. These demands were compounded during peak periods, such as the summer months, when reduced staffing further strained resources.

Managing external customer queries 

The external-facing support team managed diverse inquiries, including registration issues, profile updates, billing questions, legal document clarifications, and contract concerns. With information scattered across multiple platforms, finding accurate responses quickly was a significant challenge. Common queries required time-consuming manual responses, with an average response crafting time of five minutes per ticket.

Addressing internal employee questions

Beyond external requests, Malt’s support team also fielded frequent product-related questions from their own employees. Much like the external challenges, internal information about Malt’s products and processes was scattered, making it difficult for employees to access reliable answers independently. As a result, the support team was overwhelmed by requests that could have been resolved with better knowledge accessibility.

Faced with these challenges, Malt needed a scalable solution that could consolidate knowledge across platforms, and streamline ticket handling to provide fast, consistent support for both customers and employees, while maintaining service quality during peak periods.

Solution: implementing Dust for customer support efficiency 

Dust provided exactly what Malt needed: a flexible, intuitive AI platform capable of unifying scattered documentation and enabling quick, efficient information retrieval. Dust enabled Malt to build a suite of AI-powered assistants, branded internally as “Malty AI” to support the support operations. 

"Dust’s interface was very intuitive, it broke down the complexities of AI and made it accessible to everyone at Malt! It enabled our employees to independently build their own AI assistants, which made all the difference.” Olivier Nguyen Van Tan, Chief Marketing Officer at Malt.

External customer queries: multi-specialized AI Assistants

Dust enabled Malt to develop AI assistants specifically designed to address the varied requirements of external customer requests.

Initially, Malt introduced a single, generic assistant to manage all customer tickets. The process was triggered when care agents added a specific tag to tickets in the FrontApp, which activated a Make workflow to fetch the ticket content, process it through the Dust assistant, and return a draft response to FrontApp. However, they soon recognized the need to handle requests differently based on their categories. Malt quickly transitioned from a single, all-purpose AI assistant to a sophisticated workflow leveraging specialized assistants. 

In this new approach, Make calls an initial Dust assistant that acts as a dispatcher - it analyzes incoming customer queries and passes it to the second part which redirects to specialized AI assistants that are best suited to handle specific types of requests. Each specialized assistant is tailored to tackle distinct challenges, optimize workflows, and maintain high-quality responses and return a draft response to the FrontApp.

Legal and Compliance Assistant:

• Manages documentation requirements across countries, ensuring adherence to local laws and regulations.
• Output: provides quick, accurate guidance to Malt agents navigating complex legal and compliance-related inquiries.
• Reduces response time for legal and compliance queries.

Profile Visibility Assistant:

• Analyzes freelancer profiles and leverages Malt's knowledge base of profile optimization guidelines and marketplace best practices.
• Output: generates customized draft responses for support agents with specific recommendations for profile improvements, helping them guide freelancers to increase their visibility and booking potential.
• Reduces resolution time for profile optimization requests. 

Payments Assistant:

• Leverages CRM integration to access transaction histories.
• Output: crafts personalized responses with relevant information to handle payment-related queries.
• Reduces resolution time for common payment issues.

Each assistant has pre-built response templates that ensure consistency and accuracy for common queries. These templates are tailored to the ticket type, significantly reducing agent workload. So, when a support request comes in, these assistants draft responses using templates and knowledge base information. Support agents review and refine the drafts as needed, ensuring responses meet Malt’s quality standards before sending them to customers.

"Our support teams in newly launched territories were enthusiastic early adopters of the solution since they struggled most with our vast knowledge base."
Sarah Rezzoug, Customer Experience Manager at Malt.

Internal employees queries: “MaltyAI”, a real-time knowledge assistant in Slack

The internal Dust assistant named “Malty AI” was designed to support malters in their everyday operations. It was integrated into Slack, a platform accessible to all employees. It pulled information from key sources like Malt’s internal knowledge base in Notions, and public FAQs. This ensured that employees could instantly access answers to product-related questions without submitting formal requests.

The internal assistant became particularly useful for new employees unfamiliar with Malt’s complex processes. For example, sales team members often had questions about contract terms or tax details for specific countries. Previously, these questions were directed to the customer experience team, creating unnecessary ticket volume. With Malty AI, employees were redirected to accurate answers in Slack, reducing response times and increasing self-sufficiency.

“Embedding Dust directly into Slack was a game changer. It feels like a new teammate for all our employees - one who never gets tired of answering questions. It is highly efficient in simplifying everyone’s work, and frees us up to focus on higher-value activities” Anais Ghelfi, Head of Data platform at Malt.

Malt also developed a feedback loop within Slack, allowing users to rate responses using emojis (e.g., Good/Bad/Average/Out of Scope). This feedback was analyzed to identify areas for improvement, refine prompts, and enhance the underlying knowledge base.

Results

Today, 100% of Malt's customer experience team uses Dust assistants daily, with usage growing as new specialized assistants are developed. The introduction of Dust AI assistants brought amazing results to Malt’s customer support operations, addressing critical challenges and driving significant improvements in efficiency, response times, and overall service quality.

At a glance, here are the results of implementing Dust in Malt’s customer support process:

From 5 Minutes to seconds: Malt reduces ticket response writing time with Dust's auto-generated drafts

Prior to implementing Dust, Malt’s support agents spent an average of six minutes manually handling each ticket, and navigating scattered documentation. Five of those minutes were spent crafting responses from scratch. With the Customer Support Assistant, response drafts are now generated in seconds. This efficiency allows agents to focus on refining answers for more complex issues, rather than starting every ticket from scratch.

Malt cut ticket closing time in half 

By automating response drafting and streamlining information access with Dust assistants, support agents have more time to focus on complex customer issues, cutting average resolution time in half. 

“For the customer care assistant, we’ve achieved a 50% reduction in ticket closing time. We’re managing a higher volume of tickets and have cut processing time—from an average of 6 minutes per ticket to just a few seconds. This allows the team to focus on more complex requests, ultimately improving the overall quality and speed of customer support.” - Anaïs Ghelfi, Head of Data Platform.

Malt handle increased workload without compromising service quality or response consistency, especially during peak seasons

One of Dust’s standout contributions was its ability to deliver consistent, high-quality responses across all tickets. By leveraging pre-built templates and an up-to-date knowledge base, Dust assistants ensured that replies met Malt’s standards for accuracy and professionalism, regardless of the complexity of the inquiry.

This consistency also helped reinforce customer trust in Malt’s support services. The impact was particularly evident during peak seasons. August was traditionally a challenging month for the support team, with reduced staffing and surging ticket volumes. The Customer Support Assistant became an essential tool during this time, drafting responses for incoming tickets. This automation allowed the team to handle the increased workload without compromising service quality.

“We realized Dust AI assistant was more than a writing assistant when we activated it in August with 70% of my team on vacation. It helped the human agent extend their power and really relieved us during rush periods and hellish backlogs.” - Sarah Rezzoug, Customer Experience Manager at Malt.

Malt improved support across multiple languages, ensuring consistency and professionalism across all regions

With Malt operating across multiple countries and languages, Malt’s support team often faced challenges in maintaining consistency and accuracy in multilingual responses. Dust’s integration helped bridge this gap, enabling agents to provide high-quality support in multiple languages more efficiently, broadening Malt’s ability to serve its diverse client base.

Dust transformed Malt’s 6-12 month support agent onboarding into immediate productivity

Dust AI assistant slashes support agent ramp-up time by providing instant access to company knowledge that previously took a year to master.

"It takes nearly a year for agents to feel confident answering the breadth of queries our platform receives. With Dust AI assistant, new agents can now tap into our entire knowledge base from day one, providing accurate responses in seconds while learning on the job. What used to take months of training now happens naturally through daily interaction with Dust."  Sarah Rezzoug, Customer Experience Manager at Malt

The future: expand Dust’s role in Customer Support

The success of Dust AI assistants at Malt has fundamentally reshaped the company’s approach to customer support and internal operations. By demonstrating how AI can streamline workflows, reduce response times, and maintain service quality under pressure, Dust has become an integral part of Malt’s strategy for scalability and innovation.

Building on the remarkable results achieved with their current suite of AI-powered assistants, Malt plans to develop additional specialized assistants to handle a broader range of customer queries, ensuring a seamless support experience for their growing user base.

New assistants under consideration include:

• Disputes Handling Assistant: automating the initial stages of dispute resolution by providing structured responses and guiding users through the resolution process.
• Tax-Related Queries Assistant: offering tailored guidance on tax compliance and processes across different countries, helping both freelancers and clients navigate complex tax scenarios.

These new assistants will address high-impact areas where customers often face time-consuming or repetitive tasks, further empowering Malt’s support team to focus on more complex and nuanced interactions.

Malt’s investment in Dust is about more than solving immediate challenges, it’s a step toward building an AI-native organization. By integrating Dust into new customer support processes and other key areas, Malt aims to solidify its position as a leader in delivering efficient, high-quality services to both freelancers and clients.

To learn more about how Dust can help your customer support team, visit our Customer support page.