At the heart of Madison Reed’s customer service experience is the Color Crew, a dedicated team offering personalized advice and support, from choosing a fresh shade for a new chapter to managing hair coloring routines and booking appointments across 99 Hair Color Bars. With most of its business running on subscriptions and memberships, Madison Reed needed a way to scale its high-touch experience through a true concierge model that could deepen the customer relationship and create new opportunities for growth.
A pioneer in incorporating AI into its customer service experience, in 2025 Madison Reed brought on a partner to evolve its beloved chat bot Madi into an agentic AI virtual assistant and color-matching tool. One of the first questions Madison Reed needed to answer was whether guests would actually engage with an AI-powered experience. Madi proved that hypothesis: chat interactions increased 30x, with chat volume quickly growing to the level of phone volume. Madi created an incremental, 24/7 channel for guests and demonstrated that she could not only address inquiries typically handled by phone, but deliver a better customer experience. As Madi evolved from a test into a critical customer channel, Madison Reed’s priorities changed. The question was no longer whether guests would use Madi, but how quickly its team could improve the experience, enhance Madi’s capabilities, and turn that engagement into measurable business impact. To do that, Madison Reed needed more than access to the agent: they needed to truly own it.
Madison Reed’s previous partner proved the potential, but now it needed more visibility and control over Madi. In order to add new journeys or change Madi’s logic, Madison Reed was reliant on working through external engineers. Madison Reed needed a more “hands on” model that could turn the Color Crew’s deep customer expertise into the ability to build, test, and continuously evolve the AI experience themselves to accelerate the cycle of identifying customer needs and improving Madi. With that goal in mind, the team began searching for a new partner.
The Color Crew as Experience Architects
Madison Reed signed with Decagon and went live in production two weeks later, migrating Madi to Decagon to put the Color Crew back in control. The teams worked closely during the initial build, including daily working sessions with the Decagon team. Within three months, Madi was handling 100% of web traffic and 25,000–30,000 conversations per month while maintaining a 95% resolution rate and a 4.8 CSAT. Just as importantly, chat became an always-on channel for the first time. In a 50/50 test comparing journeys with and without Madi, she overwhelmingly delivered better results for guests, from booking appointments to finding a satisfactory resolution to a question or need.
The in-house team running Madi has no formal engineering background. Through Decagon’s enablement and hands-on support, they quickly became power users who can build, test, and ship agent logic themselves. That transition started with formal enablement covering Duet, Agent Operating Procedures, tools, debugging, and open office hours. But the goal wasn’t to teach them a collection of features. It was to give the Color Crew a repeatable way to turn their deep customer expertise into agent logic.
They quickly put this new playbook into practice. The Color Crew built seven new AOPs in just six weeks, including order status and reships, subscription changes, and missing or damaged items. The Color Crew wrote the AOPs and connected the tools themselves, without relying on Decagon to build them.
“What’s been exciting is seeing the Color Crew take ownership of Madi. They’ve taken their deep understanding of the customer and turned it into the ability to build and shape the experience themselves. That’s been a really meaningful transformation for the team.” - Chris, VP of Engineering at Madison Reed.
That transformation is paying off beyond support. Madi has become a meaningful driver of revenue, lifting appointment conversion rates 4x and saving 25% more cancellation attempts. Customers who complete the Color Quiz through Madi are purchasing their recommended shades within a week, while also making same-day purchases across other products, showing Madi’s ability to drive engagement and discovery beyond the initial recommendation.
From weeks of coordination to hours of iteration
Having ownership of the agent has also dramatically accelerated the pace of iteration. Madison Reed has gone from relying on a technical partner to having its in-house non-technical team build and evolve Madi themselves. Product and engineering can expose the APIs the team needs, then move on to other work while the Color Crew connects the APIs, tests the experience, and iterates on Madi independently. By removing the technical back-and-forth, Madison Reed has cut development time in half.
Just as importantly, the Color Crew can now identify what to build without relying on someone else to surface the problem. The team uses Watchtower to monitor conversations against complex, custom criteria and identify patterns in real time. Scheduled tasks surface gaps in agent procedures and knowledge each week, while Auto QA helps the team measure performance and find the next opportunity to improve resolution.
The result is a much shorter path from customer insight to execution.
We used to have to wait to make adjustments and investigate bugs. Now we can diagnose and update Madi in a few hours allowing us to continually tweak and improve the guest experience in real time.” Misako Mori - Manager of Education and Operations Support for Color Crew
Madi is evolving from a reactive support channel into a true concierge.
For Madison Reed, that speed is in service of a bigger vision: Madi as a concierge who knows the guest and builds a relationship over time. Memory gives Madi context across interactions, from what a guest has done to where she is in her hair color journey, creating a more personalized, one-on-one experience that builds trust.
Now, Madison Reed is working with Decagon to build proactive experiences that meet guests where they are. With a deeper understanding of each customer and their lifecycle, Madi can engage at the right time and in the moments that matter. That could mean checking in with a new Hair Color Bar customer after their appointment, helping a first-time guest understand what to expect, reminding a subscriber when it's time for a touch-up, or engaging around a new product, subscription, or abandoned cart.
The team can also ensure Madi reflects the brand’s voice. Her persona is warm, confident, accurate, and a little playful, a balance that matters in a category where changing your hair color can feel high-stakes or even scary. She needs to give guests confidence in her recommendations while making them feel comfortable and understood.
The concierge experience doesn't end when a guest leaves the chat window. Madison Reed is exploring how Madi could extend into voice and SMS, carrying the same context and personality across the channels where guests interact with the brand.
The vision is for Madi to become a true concierge: one that knows the guest, remembers them, and can engage with them at the moments that matter. With Decagon and a Color Crew that can now build and ship those experiences themselves, Madison Reed has the foundation to bring that vision to life at scale.
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