Stewart Golf's AI takes routine questions so its team can focus on hard cases
75%According to Stewart Golf and Crescendo: around 75% of incoming queries resolved by Stewie across chat and email within a month of going live; first response time down from 24-72 hours to about one minute; hand-off to a human in 24 seconds on average; 100% customer satisfaction four weeks running; 24/7 cover in the UK and US.
“The company said its AI assistant, known as “Stewie”, developed in partnership with customer experience platform provider Crescendo, is now resolving around 75% of incoming queries across chat and email channels.”
Automation News, Jun 2026 (also Crescendo customer story), 17 Jun 2026
- Who
- Stewart Golf, a British family business founded over 20 years ago that designs and handbuilds premium electric golf trolleys (including the Q Follow), with its UK headquarters and a US base in Houston, Texas. AI assistant by Crescendo, running on the company's Zendesk help centre.
- Problem
- A lean care team in Britain worked UK hours with no weekend cover, while customers played, and needed help, at weekends and five time zones away. A golfer in Florida could wait two days for an answer already in the knowledge base, and at peak season the backlog could reach thousands of tickets.
- Agent
- Stewie, a Crescendo AI assistant trained on Stewart Golf's existing Zendesk help centre, answers chat and email about trolley issues, deliveries and warranties. When a question needs a person, it hands the conversation to a human agent, in 24 seconds on average according to the company. Every interaction is scored by automatic QA, and the team turns edge cases into new help articles.
We'll build it for you
Book a callView the prompt
Try it yourself with Crescendo
You run customer care for a tennis, padel or golf club, shop or brand. Goal: plan an AI assistant that answers routine questions on chat and email, with my team taking every case that needs judgement. My input: [our last 100 support tickets or messages, anonymised], [our help articles, policies and warranty or refund rules], [team hours and time zones we serve], [who handles escalations]. Give me: 1) the top 10 question types and how often they come up; 2) which ones the assistant can answer from our content, and which must go to a person; 3) a short, on-brand reply for each routine type; 4) the hand-off rule and the message the customer sees; 5) gaps in our help content to fix first. Use only my data and flag anything you're unsure about.What we can do for your club or brand
Clubs, shops and racket or padel brands get the same questions over and over, often at weekends when nobody is at the desk. The Court can set up an AI assistant on your chat, email or WhatsApp that answers from your own help content, hands anything delicate to a named person on your team, and shows you which questions keep coming back, so your team spends its time on the customers who need it.
What they did
Stewart Golf's head of customer experience, Nathan Hooper, first tried Zendesk's basic flow bot and native AI, then chose Crescendo, which built a working assistant from the existing help centre in days. UK chat went live first after sandbox testing, US chat followed, then email in both markets. Weekdays are covered by the Stewart Golf team and weekends by Crescendo's trained human agents, with Stewie in front around the clock.
How it went
Within a month, Stewie was resolving around 75% of queries and first replies came in about a minute instead of 24-72 hours, according to the company and Crescendo. On a recent bank holiday, with two agents on leave, the team caught up in under 24 hours instead of falling about five days behind. Nathan Hooper: "It's the first time since I've been in this role, six years now, that we scored 100% customer satisfaction four weeks in a row." The team now spends its time on complex cases and on fixing gaps in the help content. Limits: figures are the company's and the vendor's; no ticket volumes or cost figures are published.