About Encompass
Encompass Supply Chain Solutions is the largest supplier of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) replacement parts in North America. Founded in 1953 and headquartered in Lawrenceville, Georgia, the company maintains one of the industry's largest catalogs of OEM parts with hundreds of thousands in active stock across strategically located distribution centers.
The Challenge
Customers primarily contact Encompass for pricing, availability, order status, backorder ETAs, and cancellations. Monthly tracking revealed that most inbound calls were transactional, repetitive inquiries that agents spent significant time addressing — particularly part-number lookups and order-status checks that could be automated.
The Partnership
Encompass's collaboration with HappyRobot began after CEO Robert Coolidge attended a presentation by HappyRobot's founder. The team conducted demos, consulted existing users, and evaluated alternatives before unanimously selecting HappyRobot as their partner.
The team started deliberately with Midea as a controlled test environment. The challenge proved significant: Encompass's alphanumeric model numbers are complex strings where a single transposed digit produces entirely wrong results. Early voice agent versions struggled with phonetically similar characters — confusing "B" for "8" or "D" for "T" — silently returning wrong parts.
Solving this required deep collaboration between HappyRobot's forward-deployed engineer Federico and the Encompass team, refining transcription logic, building validation layers, and stress-testing edge cases until achieving reliable performance.
Results
Operating in one of customer service's most unforgiving data-capture environments, HappyRobot achieved approximately 64% resolution without human escalation for Midea.
Encompass expanded to LG, a larger brand with significantly higher call volume. HappyRobot now manages roughly 1,700 LG-related calls weekly, resolving approximately 64% without human intervention.
Encompass uses a hybrid model: during business hours, calls for pricing, availability, order status, or cancellation route directly to HappyRobot from the Cisco IVR. If customers request human interaction, calls transfer accordingly. After hours, self-service remains available with callback requests forwarded to agents for next-morning follow-up.
The Bigger Picture
Encompass's objective extended beyond automating a single use case — they aimed to develop a scalable playbook. The team brought clarity from the outset, having already tracked why customers called, which calls were highest-volume, and which workflows could be addressed via API.
The current goal is extending this playbook to every brand in the Encompass portfolio. Returns, not yet automated, are under evaluation. As Brian Ecenarro noted, the team "began to engage more with the technology and realized we can do this even further." The primary constraint remains not the AI itself, but the APIs providing necessary data for each new use case.
What's Next
As multi-brand rollout nears completion, two primary goals are in focus: optimization ensuring consistent, benchmark-level performance across every active brand, and expansion in both use cases and companies.
The vision is a product where customers describe their broken appliance, receive identified and priced parts in seconds, confirm availability, and receive a purchase link via SMS — all without human interaction unless desired. At Encompass, this version is largely already operational.