How Tubi creates “magical moments” at scale with AI.
With Sierra, the streaming pioneer is transforming customer experience from a cost center into a growth engine that delivers personalized content discovery and builds fans for life.
CSAT improvement
+7 percentage points
Tubi, the free streaming platform, has built its brand around democratizing access to content. With a mission to provide all people access to all the world’s stories, swift, accurate customer support is crucial. But as the company scaled to serve millions of viewers worldwide, its customer experience team faced a familiar challenge: how do you maintain that personal touch when operating at massive scale?
The answer, as Blake Bassett and James Jones discovered, was about leaning into customer experience as a strategic advantage—one that emphasized turning support interactions into what they call "magical moments."
"I've always viewed customer support not just as an operational expenditure, but as a growth engine," says Blake Bassett, Tubi’s VP of Product. "How do you move beyond transactional interactions to provide value to both the audience and the business?"
This philosophy runs deep at Tubi, where the brand's unique value proposition—free, ad-supported content that spans global stories—creates both opportunity and complexity.
"Customer experience is such a key part of Tubi's brand and how we engage with our users," explains James Jones, who leads the brand’s AI initiatives and works closely with Blake on customer experience strategy. "We get a lot of different users on our application with different expectations and needs. Whether they're watching content at home with their families, on the go, or between exams, viewers often reach out looking to understand how to find content or how to better use the application."
The team's vision was ambitious: transform every customer interaction into an opportunity to create deeper connections with customers through swift issue resolution and personalized content recommendations. To bring this vision to life, they partnered with Sierra.
Designing for customer experiences that inspire
Before partnering with Sierra, Tubi's customer support operated through a traditional email system. "Users would send messages via our form, and our customer support agents would respond via email. Very old-school methodology, especially when people are used to more message-based systems," James recalls.
The limitations were stark. Response times stretched across hours. Peak viewing times—evenings, weekends, major sporting events—created impossible staffing challenges. "How do you 10x your team for an hour?" James asks, highlighting a core operational dilemma.
When Tubi decided to modernize their customer experience, the build-versus-buy decision wasn't taken lightly. "We're early adopters of AI and had built agentic systems internally," Bassett notes. The team had the technical chops to build their own solution—but they recognized the value of the right partner. The decision came down to more than technology. "We decided to buy instead of build because of the white-glove onboarding and training," Bassett says. "We thought Sierra was the horse worth betting on, and we've been very pleased—it's come through and delivered."
The implementation focused on two core capabilities that align directly with Tubi's mission: technical support and personalized content discovery. The Sierra-powered agent handles everything from troubleshooting streaming issues to password resets, but it's the content recommendation capability that truly embodies Tubi's vision.
"We believe in creating what we call 'magical moments'—really human exchanges where we share something we love with someone else," Blake explains. "The interesting thing about Sierra is being able to do that at a much larger scale in our brand voice, essentially recommending content by hitting an API endpoint of our catalog and using what we know about the user to recommend something that will resonate with them."
“We believe in creating what we call 'magical moments'—really human exchanges where we share something we love with someone else. The interesting thing about Sierra is being able to do that at a much larger scale in our brand voice.”
With the agent deployed, those once-tricky staffing challenges simply disappeared—the AI agent absorbs the demand spikes during prime time and live events, maintaining consistent service quality whether it's 3PM on a Tuesday or the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl.
From support interactions to actionable intelligence
Three months post-launch, the results have been transformative—and surprising. "I was probably most nervous about CSAT going down," James admits. "I had hypothesized that people really want a human-to-human interface, and sending them to AI would bring our CSAT down. But what I realized is that people want answers—they want resolutions to their issues."
“I had hypothesized that people really want a human-to-human interface, and sending them to AI would bring our CSAT down. But what I realized is that people want answers—they want resolutions to their issues.”
The numbers tell the story: CSAT increased by seven percentage points, containment reached 80%, and resolution times shifted from hours or days to minutes.
Perhaps most importantly, the agent has freed up the human team to focus on higher-value work. "Now they're spending more time providing insights to the rest of the organization about what users are saying, which influences roadmaps and helps our engineers better understand where to address technical debt," James explains. "It's enabled our teams to focus not just on answering questions, but providing insights that are useful to the business as a whole."
Meanwhile, through the partnership, Tubi’s CX team has experienced a mindset shift—and leveled up their AI skills at the same time. "Often when working with AI and customer experience teams, it can be nerve-wracking—’What does this mean for what I'll be doing in the future?’,” James says. “But after going through [Sierra’s customer-facing training program] Sierra University, I've seen our customer experience team energized and actually building on their own to help improve our agent. That's been pretty awesome."
The bigger vision: democratizing those magical moments
As streaming services increasingly compete on experience rather than just content, Tubi's approach offers a blueprint for the industry. By treating customer experience as a strategic advantage rather than a necessary cost, and by choosing the right AI partner to scale that vision, they've created a system that doesn't just resolve issues—it creates fans.
"Every interaction is an opportunity to create a fan for life," Bassett reflects. With Sierra, Tubi isn't just handling customer service at scale—they're delivering magical moments, one conversation at a time.
