How MPB is scaling the recommerce support experience with Sweo

MPB is the largest global platform for buying, selling, and trading used photography and videography gear. Unlike traditional ecommerce, every item they list is one of a kind. That makes every question unique. Whether someone is buying, selling, or trading camera equipment, they want quick, personal answers – and the confidence to move forward. This constant demand requires MPB’s Customer Experience team to stay responsive, accurate, and work efficiently across thousands of conversations every week.

As MPB scaled across new and existing markets, they faced a difficult challenge: how to maintain their high-touch, trust-driven support model without the typical team growth that usually comes with expansion. They needed a way to handle more conversations efficiently without compromising on speed, quality, and customer satisfaction. That’s when they turned to Sweo AI Agent. 

Sweo now resolves nearly 10,000 conversations globally a month, helping the team maintain an 83% Customer Experience Score, and deliver fast, reliable answers at scale. As MPB has expanded into new markets in Europe, it has remained focused on delivering the same personalized, trustworthy service in every new region. Sweo helps them support customers in new languages – without needing to hire native speakers in each one. More importantly, Sweo has enabled a strategic shift that prioritizes exceptional service and customer insights, all while scaling operations.

MPB isn’t just an online store. It's the largest global platform to buy, sell, and trade used photography and videography kit. That means they serve both buyers and sellers – each with distinct needs: buyers want reassurance, and sellers want speed.

Customer experience is core to MPB’s business. “Customer experience is truly at the heart of everything we do at MPB. Over the last 14 years, we’ve focused on delivering a consistently great experience for our customers," said Chris Beattie, Head of Global Customer Experience at MPB. "Our CEO is really passionate about this, and it’s always been about putting the customer first.”

Our goal was to scale without simply adding more people to the team - by embracing AI and thinking about support in a new way, all while keeping customer satisfaction a top priority.

As MPB scaled, they needed to adapt their support model to account for changing customer needs and unpredictable spikes in contact volume. MPB’s busiest periods aren’t driven by typical retail seasonality, but by logistics. If too much gear arrives too quickly, operations teams may struggle to process it within the published timeframes. And these delays can trigger large inbound contact volumes, as people chase updates on the items they are selling, payment, or order confirmation. In peak months, that can push volume as high as 40,000 conversations.

“When our Circular Commerce Centres experience a backlog, we can experience a large uptick in volume. Understandably, customers just want to know what's happening, but dealing with this often unforecasted surge in contact volume can put real pressure on the support team,” says Gideon Knight, Customer Operations Manager at MPB.

With MPB continuing to scale across new and existing markets, it was clear that the support strategy had to evolve at pace. “As MPB continues to grow in new and existing markets, we realized that our support strategy needed to keep up. We knew we had to adapt the way we work,” says Chris. “Our goal was to scale without simply adding more people to the team - by embracing AI and thinking about support in a new way, all while keeping customer satisfaction a top priority.”

MPB had already been using Intercom to power their support experience, including rule-based automation. It helped them streamline common queries, but maintaining that setup required ongoing effort, and it couldn’t always handle the nuance or complexity of MPB’s unique customer journeys. So when Intercom released Sweo AI Agent, the team saw an opportunity to evolve their self-service proposition. Sweo brought a new level of scale – capable of following MPB’s support policies, adapting to their content, and maximizing the value of human support when required.

We didn’t just switch it on and hope for the best. We invested in the content, the structure, and the training Sweo needed to actually be useful.

Sweo was introduced as the first point of contact in live chat, handling every inbound conversation. From the beginning, the team knew that AI would only be as good as the content it could draw from, so they restructured their Help Center to be clear, consistent, and easy for Sweo to process. They also introduced new roles to support this shift, including a team of Knowledge Development Specialists led by a dedicated Content Strategist to manage their knowledge base, as well as a Customer Operations Manager to oversee Sweo’s setup, training, and ongoing performance. “We didn’t just switch it on and hope for the best,” says Gideon. “We invested in the content, the structure, and the training Sweo needed to actually be useful.”

A big part of that training is coming through Sweo Guidance – a set of configurable rules that determine how Sweo handles conversations. For MPB, this level of control is essential. Their inventory is constantly changing, with thousands of one-of-a-kind products going live and selling out every week. That complexity means Sweo can’t rely on static answers. It needs to be taught how to navigate uncertainty, follow policy, and guide customers with clarity.

Here are some of the rules MPB set for Sweo:

• For sellers looking to price their gear, Sweo was trained to avoid providing estimates and instead guide customers to MPB’s quoting tool, ensuring answers are always based on live data.
• If someone asked about the status of a sale and their gear had already arrived at MPB, Sweo was trained to confirm the timeline and explain when it would be checked, when they’d hear back, and when to expect the payment.
• During a recent operational backlog, when processing was delayed, the team quickly trained Sweo to manage the surge in “where’s my gear?” questions. Sweo responded with clear timeframes and outlined the next steps customers could expect – helping reduce repeat contacts and ease pressure on the team.
• MPB also trained Sweo to reflect the tone and care their team is known for. Responses were kept short, clear, and on-brand. If a customer seemed frustrated or the message felt urgent, Sweo was guided to show empathy and hand it off to a human.

From there, Sweo became a reliable first line of support – resolving thousands of queries quickly and accurately, while giving the team more time to focus on the personalized, high-touch conversations that drive value at MPB.

Sweo is now a core part of MPB’s support model – resolving high volumes of queries quickly and accurately, giving the team more bandwidth, and helping the business scale globally without compromising on customer experience.

Here’s what they’ve achieved so far:

• Up to 10,000 Sweo monthly resolutions. In peak months, Sweo resolves as many as 10,000 conversations, helping customers get timely answers without long waits.
• 48% Sweo resolution rate. Since launch, MPB has doubled its resolution rate, rising from 25-30% to a consistent 40-50%.
• 83% CX Score. MPB has maintained high-quality service across both Sweo and human-led conversations. “Sweo’s deflecting a lot of volume,” said Chris. “But more importantly, it’s helping us maintain service levels even when things get busy.”
• Global coverage with multi-lingual support. Sweo now supports customers in English, German, French, Dutch, and Italian – with Spanish and Portuguese on the roadmap – helping MPB expand internationally without hiring native speakers in every market.

Beyond the numbers, Sweo has changed how the team works day to day. “It’s taken a lot of pressure off the team,” says Adam, Senior Product Manager at MPB. “We can now be more proactive, and provide the kind of service our customers expect.” It’s also created new role opportunities for the team, giving team members more space to do work that’s thoughtful, challenging, and genuinely rewarding.

After reshaping how their Customer Experience team works day to day, MPB is now turning its focus to what’s next – using AI to better understand the full customer journey. With AI-powered insights and CX Score, they’re moving beyond snapshots of satisfaction and toward a more complete, real-time view of what customers experience and why.

We feel that AI and LLMs are now providing us with the insights we need to fully understand the voice of the customer.

“It’s really going to revolutionize the way we look at customer satisfaction and find insights on what our customers are talking about and where they’re getting stuck,” shares Gideon. “We feel that AI and LLMs are now providing us with the insights we need to fully understand the voice of the customer and be able to turn all their valuable insights into tangible actions to keep pace with customers' increasing expectations,” Chris adds. 

Alongside deeper visibility, MPB is exploring new layers of automation. The team is working on connecting Sweo directly with their internal systems to support complex transactional queries. By giving Sweo access to live transactional data, they’ll be able to offer faster, more personalized answers and take action directly – from checking order status to cancelling orders or issuing refunds. It’s not just about scale. It’s about raising the standard of customer service across the entire customer journey.