Support as a Core Experience

For Arena Club, customer support isn’t just a backoffice function, it’s a core part of the product. Their support philosophy is simple: delivering a VIP, white-glove experience to every customer. With high-value items and passionate collectors, Arena Club knows that trust hinges on fast, empathetic, accurate help.

As Matt explains, the goal is to:

“Leverage our customer support to make sure that we are delivering a world-class experience"

Why Arena Club Turned to Champ?

1. Scaling a VIP Experience

As Arena Club’s collector base grew, delivering true VIP-level support to every user became increasingly difficult for a small team.

Matt put it plainly:

“I have a capacity of how many people I could connect with, I could talk to, the level of service I could give.”

Champ AI gave Arena Club a way to extend that capacity. Instead of simply “adding a chatbot,” we implemented a workflow engine that could follow their SOPs end-to-end. Champ AI triages issues, gathers context, automates tickets and escalates thoughtfully, so their white-glove experience could be sustained around the clock as volume surged.

2. Closing the Feedback Loop with Product & Engineering

As Arena Club continued to ship new features and products, the team needed a faster, more consistent way to surface technical issues to engineering. 

Support agents were rightly focused on helping customers in the moment. But that meant the deeper root cause of an issue didn’t always make its way back to the product team in a structured format.

“We made sure that the customer was taken care of and that they're happy with the resolution, but we probably didn't log the core element of what the issue was”

Before Champ, identifying and categorizing a bug took time. Agents had to exchange details, collect screenshots, and attempt to reproduce the issue.

“It would take a day or two to triage the issue… it could be three days before we actually created the Jira ticket”

Arena Club needed more than faster replies; they needed automated workflows that could reliably capture, structure, and route this information.

The Big Breakthrough: Capturing Product Bugs

The biggest breakthrough for Arena Club was Champ’s ability to significantly improve product quality for Arena Club, by automating the workflow that starts when a customer reports a problem:

• Detecting potential product bugs in support conversations

• Structuring all relevant details (steps to reproduce, environment, timing)

• Automatically creating high-quality Jira tickets

• Routing them to the right engineering team

This removed the manual gaps that previously slowed or obscured important product insights. As a result, recurring issues across core features dropped noticeably. As Matt shared, “overall reports of certain issues are down.”

This automation strengthened the feedback loop into engineering, ensuring issues were documented accurately and completely. By generating detailed Jira tickets, including URLs, evidence, and clear descriptions, Champ delivered what Matt considers the biggest breakthrough:

“Understanding the true technical issue that a customer was experiencing, in a few seconds, that is so powerful.”

The Obvious Impact: White-Glove Support at Scale

“CSAT is up week over week”

Champ allowed Arena Club to extend their VIP-level service to every collector, no matter the time of day or the volume of incoming requests. What was once limited by team bandwidth became a 24/7 experience, ensuring that even late-night issues were met with immediate attention. As Matt put it, “If somebody has a problem at two in the morning, Champ is responding and triaging the issue.”

This always-on support reflects Arena Club’s philosophy around AI. As their team explained, they never viewed AI as a way to cut corners or automate people out. “It was really a supplemental way to deliver an even better customer experience”  Their aim was enhancement, not replacement, and Champ provided the exact support for that vision.

Today:

• Champ touches ~75% of Arena Club’s support tickets.

• Within those, in about 45% of cases, Champ fully resolves the issue, giving customers fast, accurate support.

• And for an additional 25% of the tickets Champ is involved in, Champ follows Arena Club’s SOPs to gather full context and hand off to a support rep or escalate to engineering in a clear, structured format.

By the time a teammate steps in, they already know what’s happening and can focus entirely on delivering the best outcome.

The result is not just efficiency, but happier customers. With faster answers, more accurate resolutions, and smoother handoffs between AI and human agents, Arena Club saw meaningful improvements in customer sentiment across the board. AI didn’t dilute their VIP experience; it elevated it.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Champ with Arena Club

Having proven that Champ can elevate Arena Club’s high bar for white glove support, Arena Club wants to take Champ deeper into product development. As Matthew explained, 

“I would want to dig deeper on product development cycles and in beta testing of products… the accuracy of what you guys are able to do with Jira creation is so powerful.”

Arena Club sees three major opportunities for Champ’s SOP and workflow automation:

1. Helping collectors discover new products
   Use support and community conversations to intelligently surface relevant products, Slab Packs®, and features by guiding users toward new offerings at the exact moment intent is highest.

2. Supporting expansion into new categories and demographicsAs Arena Club grows into new segments, Champ’s categorization and tracking can surface friction points across the funnel and support fast product iteration cycles.

Throughout all of this, Arena Club remains grounded in their core philosophy: AI should elevate the experience, not replace the human relationships that define their brand. Champ has shown it can deliver on that vision while helping the team move faster, learn faster, and grow with confidence.

Working With Champ

“I really do feel like we are one team”

Working with Arena Club has been the kind of partnership we hope to build with every customer, collaborative, fast-moving, and grounded in shared goals. From day one, the relationship has felt seamless: iterating quickly and refining workflows together to elevate the experience for all Arena Club’s users.

The most impressive thing about champ? “Quality, without a doubt” as Matt put it.