The company
Textla is an SMS marketing platform: bulk texting with segmentation and scheduling, a shared inbox for replies, and contact import from a CSV or an integration. Its site says it has sent more than two billion messages for 21,000 businesses, and it is SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant. Customers are small businesses, from a coffee shop to a clinic, who sign up online and start texting the same day.
The problem
A self-serve product with tens of thousands of business customers gets a steady stream of quick questions in chat, at all hours. Most of them have an answer in the help content. Textla wanted those answered straight away, without the team, and wanted to keep the harder conversations, and the sales ones, for people.
They also wanted control over exactly when eesel steps in. The Intercom bot already splits chats into sales and support, and the team did not want an AI answering a sales enquiry.
How it runs
Kellen Brown set up eesel on Intercom in October 2025, starting with a trial in which eesel only left internal notes so the team could see what it would have said. Training it on the help content was the easy part; the work was fitting it into the existing Intercom flow.
- Intercom is the channel. eesel answers customers in Intercom conversations and tickets, replying as a fixed Intercom teammate. A public chat link is also connected.
- Support only. The Intercom bot asks sales or support first. eesel replies only on conversations assigned to a specific teammate, so the team controls which chats reach it.
- A corrections doc. When the team wants an answer phrased differently, they write it in a corrections document that eesel learns from, rather than editing the bot itself.
- A person for the rest. eesel gives the first answer and stops where a human touch is needed; those conversations stay with the team.
In their words
Kellen Brown, who set eesel up at Textla, put it this way: "eesel acts as our front-line support in Intercom until a human touch is needed. Answering quick questions when the team is unavailable and letting us handle the issues that only we can. It answers confidently but not too confidently, and training it has been super easy."