How Freshpet scaled pet parent care without losing the human touch

For Freshpet, consumer care is about far more than answering product questions. Pet parents reach out with concerns about feeding routines, nutrition, ingredients, and the health of pets they consider family members. Every interaction carries emotional weight, and every response shapes trust in the brand.

As Freshpet expanded into new recipes, products, and channels, those conversations grew quickly across phone, chat, social media, and the FAQ bot on freshpet.com. The consumer care team needed a way to scale without making interactions feel automated or impersonal.

Lisa Diehl, Senior Director of Consumer Care at Freshpet, leads that effort across every consumer touchpoint, from real-time social conversations to live-agent support and self-service experiences.

The challenge: scaling support without making care feel transactional

As more pet parents turned to digital channels with questions about nutrition, feeding routines, and product guidance, Freshpet’s consumer care operation became more complex to manage. Conversations were spread across growing channels and workflows, making it harder for teams to maintain consistency and respond efficiently at scale.

Before expanding the company’s use of Emplifi, existing tools were not being fully utilized, limiting visibility across interactions and making it harder to keep pace as engagement volumes grew.

The challenge became especially important because Freshpet’s conversations are rarely transactional. Questions about pet health and nutrition often come with anxiety, emotion, and urgency. The team needed a way to move faster across channels while still making every interaction feel thoughtful and human.

The approach: meet pet parents where conversations are already happening

Freshpet focused its strategy on the channels where pet parents naturally look for advice, recommendations, and wellness conversations. Rather than trying to maintain a presence everywhere, the team prioritized platforms where real-time engagement mattered most.

TikTok and Instagram quickly became central to that approach, giving Freshpet visibility into the conversations pet parents were already having around feeding routines, nutrition, and pet wellness.

At the same time, the team redefined how care responsibilities were handled. Routine questions were routed through Scout, Freshpet’s FAQ bot on freshpet.com, along with Chaser, the custom meals subscription delivery bot on delivery.freshpet.com, while live agents focused on more sensitive conversations involving feeding guidance, product concerns, and health-related questions where empathy matters as much as speed.

The solution: one connected view of the pet parent journey

Freshpet implemented the full Emplifi suite to unify consumer care workflows and create a shared view across channels. Each part of the platform now plays a specific operational role within the team’s day-to-day support model.

• Scout and Chaser, the FAQ bots. Resolve routine questions on freshpet.com in real time, freeing live agents to focus on complex health and nutrition cases.
• Unified analytics. Consolidates pet parent data so every interaction is seen with full context, not in isolation, especially important for health and nutrition questions where details matter.
• Social listening. Enables the team to proactively join real-time wellness conversations on TikTok and Instagram, even when Freshpet is not tagged.
• BI integration. Feeds consumer care data directly into Freshpet’s business intelligence stack to measure CPM, identify quality themes, and turn anecdotal feedback into structured signal.

The result is a more coordinated operation where conversations can move smoothly between automation and live support without losing context. Teams can identify recurring themes faster, respond more efficiently, and engage with a clearer understanding of the pet parent’s full experience.

Faster responses, deeper trust, and care built around real conversations

With routine inquiries handled through Scout and Chaser, Freshpet reduced pressure on live support teams and created more capacity for thoughtful, high-emotion interactions. Agents can now spend more time helping pet parents navigate feeding questions, nutrition concerns, and product guidance without sacrificing responsiveness.

The operational improvements also changed how Freshpet uses consumer care insights internally. Instead of treating conversations as isolated support tickets, the company now uses recurring patterns and themes to inform decisions across multiple teams.

• Strategic business influence. Recurring themes around recipes, ingredients, feeding guidance, and quality concerns are shared with marketing, digital product, and quality teams to improve messaging, website content, education, or address product issues at the source.
• Proactive engagement. Emplifi surfaces moments where pet parents may need guidance, like starting a fresh food routine, calculating feeding amounts, or finding the right recipe for their pet’s lifestyle, so Freshpet can show up with the right support at the right time.
• Operational scalability. The team handles significantly higher engagement across channels while maintaining a sustainable operating model that protects the warmth of every interaction.
• Human-centric AI. Automation partners with agents rather than replacing them, keeping every conversation feeling warm, caring, and true to the Freshpet brand.

For Freshpet, the biggest lesson was that scaling consumer care did not require choosing between efficiency and empathy. The more routine questions Scout and Chaser could resolve in real time, the more space agents had for the conversations that mattered most, helping nervous pet parents navigate feeding changes, nutrition questions, and health concerns with reassurance and care.

What started as an effort to better manage growing engagement across channels evolved into something larger: a connected system where everyday conversations now shape marketing, product education, quality feedback, and proactive support. Instead of treating support as a reactive function, Freshpet turned consumer care into a consistent source of operational insight and consumer understanding.

Key takeaways

• Efficiency enables empathy. Reducing routine call volume through bots gives human agents the space to focus on high-stakes health and nutrition inquiries.
• Look beyond the narrative. Centralized reporting helps the organization move past anecdotal evidence and see patterns at scale to inform smarter business decisions.
• Be intentional about channels. Focus on the channels where real-time wellness conversations happen, like TikTok and Instagram, rather than trying to be everywhere.
• Build a strategic partnership. Moving from a software-user relationship to a strategic partnership lets the care team become the voice for pet parents across the entire organization.

By 2026, Freshpet has evolved its consumer care capability from reactive support to proactive engagement and strategic insight. With Emplifi, the brand continues to deepen the bond between people and their pets, ensuring every interaction feels personal, helpful, and caring.