AI-Powered Email Triage for Hako Australia
When Hako Australia's lean customer service team was spending hours each week manually sorting a high-volume catch-all inbox, Friendlyware Partners designed and deployed an AI-powered email triage and response-drafting solution.
The system now automatically routes every incoming enquiry to the right internal team and prepares a ready-to-review reply, eliminating manual sorting while keeping staff firmly in control of every customer response.
The result is faster routing, consistent communication, and coordinators freed to focus on customers rather than paperwork.
Hako Australia Pty Limited is the local operation of a global manufacturer of industrial cleaning machines, selling and servicing equipment for commercial and industrial customers across the country.
Client Spotlight
The Problem
All general customer enquiries arrived through two catch-all addresses that had no natural owner. Coordinators read each message by hand, judged whether it concerned sales, service, or parts, and forwarded it to the relevant functional mailbox. The process was slow, easy to misroute, and pulled the team away from higher-value work during busy periods. Because replies were written ad hoc by whoever picked up the message, tone and quality varied from one customer to the next, undermining a consistent, professional brand experience.
The Challenge
Friendlyware had to deliver real automation without sacrificing the human judgement and accountability the business depended on. Specific obstacles included:
• Classifying enquiries accurately across overlapping sales, service, and parts categories, including ambiguous and edge-case messages.
• Guaranteeing that no email could ever be sent autonomously — staff had to review every response for quality and compliance.
• Maintaining a consistent, on-brand tone across all replies regardless of which coordinator handled them.
• Working within Hako's existing Microsoft 365 and Zapier environment with no custom software development and minimal IT effort.
• Meeting data-privacy obligations when routing customer email content to an external AI service.
The Solution
Friendlyware implemented a three-layer, human-in-the-loop workflow connecting Hako's mailboxes to Anthropic's Claude AI through the Zapier automation platform. Key deliverables included:
• Automated triage engine: Each new email in the catch-all accounts is automatically passed to Claude, which classifies it as Sales, Service, Parts, or Uncertain and returns a confidence rating.
• Intelligent routing: Conditional logic forwards every enquiry to the correct functional mailbox, while low-confidence messages are flagged for manual review rather than guessed.
• Consistent draft replies: Claude drafts a professional, on-brand response using documented tone and classification rules, saved into the target mailbox for staff to edit and send.
• Human-in-the-loop control: The AI drafts but never sends — coordinators retain final say on every customer reply.
• Cost-efficient, scalable build: Built on the Claude Haiku model and existing tooling, with a full audit trail of every classification and draft generated.
• Phased, de-risked rollout: A shadow-mode pilot validated accuracy against real historical emails before the solution went fully live.Friendlyware implemented a three-layer, human-in-the-loop workflow connecting Hako's mailboxes to Anthropic's Claude AI through the Zapier automation platform. Key deliverables included:
• Automated triage engine: Each new email in the catch-all accounts is automatically passed to Claude, which classifies it as Sales, Service, Parts, or Uncertain and returns a confidence rating.
• Intelligent routing: Conditional logic forwards every enquiry to the correct functional mailbox, while low-confidence messages are flagged for manual review rather than guessed.
• Consistent draft replies: Claude drafts a professional, on-brand response using documented tone and classification rules, saved into the target mailbox for staff to edit and send.
• Human-in-the-loop control: The AI drafts but never sends — coordinators retain final say on every customer reply.
• Cost-efficient, scalable build: Built on the Claude Haiku model and existing tooling, with a full audit trail of every classification and draft generated.
• Phased, de-risked rollout: A shadow-mode pilot validated accuracy against real historical emails before the solution went fully live.
Real Businesses, Real Challenges, Real IT Solutions
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