Finiki is a premium pet food brand serving Singapore pet owners with a curated range of high-quality dog and cat food, treats and toppers. The range leans into ingredient quality and freshness, with individually packaged kibbles, dehydrated treats and a subscription-friendly model designed around recurring delivery.
The customer base is small, engaged and highly particular. Pet owners do their research before they switch food brands, and they expect to be able to ask detailed questions about ingredients, sourcing, dietary suitability and feeding guidelines before they commit. Once they do commit, the relationship becomes a long, recurring one.
That recurring relationship is the operational heart of the business. The brand's economics depend on customers staying on subscription, which means the post-purchase experience matters as much as the first conversion. Delivery hiccups, address changes, pause requests, and the inevitable 'is my dog allowed this' messages are constant.
Finiki operates online-first, with WhatsApp as a natural fit for the kind of warm, fast back-and-forth that pet owners want. The brand had to find a way to give every customer the responsiveness of a specialist pet store without growing a support team to match.
Customer messages used to arrive predominantly by email, which set a multi-hour reply expectation by default. That was a poor fit for a category where pet owners often need answers the same day, especially around delivery timing, feeding questions and any whisper of a dietary concern.
The category itself runs hot on urgency. A new customer asking 'is this safe for my dog with a chicken allergy' will not wait until tomorrow for an answer. A subscriber asking 'can I change the delivery address before it ships' is racing the warehouse and needs a confirmation now, not after lunch.
Manually managing reorders, address changes and pause/resume requests through email was slow and error-prone. Each request involved checking the Shopify backend, updating the subscription, replying to confirm, and hoping nothing fell through the cracks. As the subscriber base grew, the error rate climbed with it.
Pre-purchase questions were another bottleneck. The brand's edge is ingredient quality, but explaining that edge takes a real conversation. Email simply could not move fast enough to convert a curious browser into a first-order subscriber while the interest was hot.
Post-delivery touchpoints were inconsistent. Some weeks had strong follow-up; others passed in silence. The natural upsell moment, the day after a customer received a great-looking order, was often missed because there was no system fast enough to catch it.
The cumulative effect was a customer experience that did not match the quality of the product. A brand built on care and precision was, on the support side, only as fast as someone could open their email.
We deployed a team of AI agents in front of the Finiki customer journey, with WhatsApp as the primary channel and Shopify wired in for order events. The architecture treats every customer interaction as part of a continuous relationship, not as separate transactions.
A Pre-purchase Advisor handles the front of the funnel. It answers ingredient, sizing and product questions before checkout, gives honest guidance on which product fits a specific pet's needs, and converts curiosity into a first order while the interest is fresh.
An Order Support Agent owns the post-purchase moment. It confirms orders, updates delivery details, answers status questions in real time and handles the inevitable last-minute change requests without making the customer wait. Because it is wired into Shopify directly, it sees order state the moment it changes.
A Subscription Concierge sets up and manages monthly auto-delivery. Pause, resume and skip requests, frequency changes, product swaps, the whole subscription surface area is handled inside a WhatsApp thread without the customer ever having to log into an account.
A Delivery Coordinator follows up after each order. It confirms the package arrived in good condition, asks about how the pet is responding, and surfaces upsell opportunities at the highest-intent moment, the day after a happy customer received a great-looking delivery.
The four agents share state across every conversation. A customer who asked about salmon allergies last month, ordered the duck range, and now wants to upgrade to monthly delivery is handled as one continuous customer, not three separate tickets.
Humans take over the moment the conversation needs care: a real complaint, a vet-related dietary question that warrants extra caution, or a subscription save that calls for a personal touch. The handoff carries everything that has happened so far.
Our customers used to email us about orders and we’d take hours to get back. Now they message on WhatsApp, get instant updates, and half of them end up adding something else to their next order.Austin Yoon · Founder
Customers now get instant replies on WhatsApp instead of waiting hours for an email response. The shift from email to live conversation has changed the entire feel of the customer relationship, in a category where speed is itself a form of care.
Subscription enrolment now happens inside the conversation itself, often during the post-delivery follow-up when a happy customer is most likely to commit. The path from one-off purchase to recurring subscriber has compressed from days of email back-and-forth to a single thread.
The human team is freed from repetitive order admin. Address changes, pause requests and status questions no longer require manual Shopify lookups, which frees the team to focus on product, content and community building.
Error rates on subscription admin have effectively disappeared, because the agent never forgets to update the address or skip the wrong month. The compounding cost of small support mistakes is gone.
For a brand whose retention is the engine of its growth, having a system that protects the subscription relationship at every touchpoint, rather than waiting for someone to remember to follow up, has changed what is possible operationally.
Figures reflect the trailing 90 days against an internal baseline. Conversion lifts measured against the pre-deployment quarter.
Every agent reads the live Shopify catalogue, tracking numbers, and customer order history before answering. A 'where is my order' question gets resolved in under thirty seconds without anyone in the team touching the inbox.
This case study is featured with the permission of Finiki's owners.
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