Printing is more than just about proofs and papers – it’s a way for people to bring their ideas to life – and Mixam is on a mission to empower that creativity by making printing easy and affordable for everyone. Since their founding in 2008, the leading online print and print-on-demand platform has rapidly expanded to serve customers across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany, with plans to enter new markets soon.
From amateurs and photographers to artists, self-publishers, and established businesses, customers use Mixam’s sophisticated, user-friendly tools to design online or integrate seamlessly with their art management systems. But what truly distinguishes Mixam is the wealth of knowledge of its team: a dedicated group of 85 professionals with diverse expertise spanning design, production, and other facets of the printing industry.
Mixam uses Front across the entire company to streamline daily operations. Far beyond a customer service platform, Front functions as Mixam’s fully integrated workflow solution that seamlessly connects with their own bespoke ecommerce platform. This eliminates the need to context switch. With all relevant information accessible on a single screen, employees can quickly address inquiries, fulfill new orders, and manage custom artwork with their characteristic attention to detail.
Front provides the automation we need, allowing us to focus on our core business instead of building it ourselves — a much-needed time saver.
Challenges
Overcoming limitations of a legacy helpdesk
Before adopting Front in 2019, Mixam paired HelpScout for customer inquiries with a custom-built internal dashboard for managing ecommerce workflows and store events. While these tools provided a basic framework, they came with significant limitations. Automation was virtually nonexistent, leaving the team to manually handle many repetitive tasks. Plus, maintaining the bespoke dashboard was costly and time-intensive, consuming development resources that could have been better allocated.
As Mixam’s business expanded, these challenges became increasingly untenable. They needed to improve inquiry response times and streamline order fulfillment, but existing tools simply couldn’t keep up with demand.
A buggy dashboard with unreliable metrics
Metrics tracking was another pain point: HelpScout only handled email inquiries, offering no insights into broader workflows. And the internal dashboard was overloaded with tasks, leading to frequent reliability issues. “The dashboard had some metrics, but was very complex and buggy. It took up so much development time that could have been spent on more high-value work,” says Lucian Puca, Mixam’s Automation and Workflow Lead.
These bottlenecks and inefficiencies highlighted the urgent need for a more robust, integrated, and scalable solution — one that could enable automation, improve efficiency, and help the team better serve Mixam’s customers.
In the end, Front checked most of our boxes and was also the most flexible in terms of APIs.
Solutions
Integrated solutions and automation improve response times and workflow efficiency
When evaluating a new platform, Mixam took a holistic approach, considering feedback from both its employees and customers. The company gathered insights from key teams, including development, customer support, and management, to understand their needs, pain points, and what they valued most in a new solution.
After thorough consideration, Front emerged as the clear choice: Its flexibility, particularly in terms of API integrations, made it an ideal fit, allowing teams to customize workflows and automate processes.
Today, customer inquiries come from various sources—orders, website forms, email, and chat. Front automatically labels, categorizes, and routes each inquiry to the appropriate team, with auto-assignment based on the customer’s store country.
Thanks to Front’s API and integrations, all relevant information is pulled into the platform, giving team members a detailed view of each inquiry. “With Front, everyone has everything they need at first glance,” says Lucian. For example, order-related messages display the order number, item details, pricing, and shipping date—all in one window, eliminating the need to navigate multiple platforms.
Recent integrations, including a custom-built AI chat agent, further enhance automation and streamline customer interactions. Plus, every action in Front, whether responding or making updates, syncs with Mixam’s server workflow, ensuring consistency across teams.
Front integrates seamlessly with our bespoke e-commerce platform. We log all important actions from our e-commerce platform using Front’s API. This includes new orders ready to be fulfilled, customer inquiries from our website messaging app, or even an invoicing issue. They are tagged and automatically routed to the relevant teams all from one software. It’s pretty great.
Improving teamwork and efficiency with real-time tools and AI insights
Mixam leverages several of Front’s core features to optimize customer service and internal workflows. Take Front Chat, which enables the team to engage with customers in real time. Mixam has fully automated common inquiries, such as requests for ETAs or tracking numbers — which improves response times, reduces manual effort, and frees up team members to focus on more complex tasks.
Additionally, Front’s AI capabilities play a pivotal role: The team uses AI to summarize conversations and provide quick insights into customer inquiries. “The AI summaries are really helpful, and I’m confident Front’s AI features will continue driving even greater impact in the future.,” says Lucian. “ I’ve done a few rounds of beta tests with Front’s AI team. Each round of testing went well and the team really did listen to feedback.”
Another feature Mixam relies on is AI tagging, which allows them tag by sentiment or topic, such as delayed orders. “To capture urgent inquiries, we love the AI tagging feature,” says Lucian. “Inquiries are automatically tagged, and the people that need to see a message see it instantly, meaning we don’t waste any time and can help our customers right away.”
Actionable insights improve response times and optimize staffing
Where they couldn’t leverage many metrics before, Front analytics give Mixam clear insights into their performance and impact. “First response times, especially for chats, are a key metric. We also monitor customer satisfaction and inquiry volume, including new conversations,” says Lucian. “These metrics are especially helpful during peak times, as they make it easier to plan for the future by predicting inquiry volumes and staffing needs.”
Results
60% improvement in first response times
Previously, Mixam’s in-house chat system was prone to missed notifications and was difficult to manage, causing inefficiencies. The transition to Front’s more reliable and user-friendly chat interface has transformed how the team handles inquiries, with customers now benefiting from quicker responses and more streamlined interactions. “Since we adopted Front, we’ve seen better chat volumes, and first-response times have gone up by almost 60%, which is a huge, massive improvement,” says Lucian.
This shift to Front Chat has had a notable impact on other contact channels as well. Email and call inquiries have dropped by 16%, as more customers prefer the fast, efficient chat experience. As a result, the team has seen faster resolution times. “With Front, we’re able to respond in under a minute, with an average resolution time of 16-18 minutes,” says Lucian.
Tackling new challenges and dreaming up future features
The shift to Front was a significant change for Mixam, but the team quickly adapted. “Change, especially in the way a team works daily, can be met with resistance, but Front’s intuitive interface and flexible features made the transition smoother than expected,” says Lucian. Today, 8 out of 10 challenges are addressed simply by creating rules or adding extra APIs in Front.
Front opened the road to better automation, better response times, and comes with quite an easy UI to learn. When we get new team members, they don’t require extensive training.
One feature that Mixam particularly values is Front’s Ideas Portal. “We definitely felt heard and have already used several features that originated from our ideas,” says Lucian. This ongoing communication and continuous feature enhancement based on real-world feedback have made Front an indispensable tool for Mixam’s success.
