How VanMoof used an AI chatbot to scale customer service – without increasing costs

Customer Story
Quick growth! It’s what most businesses dream of. However, it can come with challenges. That’s what happened to the Dutch e-bike brand VanMoof. When their business took off, the company needed to scale its service fast, but without increasing costs. Together with Chatlayer by Sinch, VanMoof found the perfect solution: a conversational AI chatbot.
Conversational AI chatbot

Overview

Challenge: handling FAQs in different languages to keep customer satisfaction high

Solution: implementing a chatbot on their website to support customers with their queries

Results: improved customer experience and fast, cost-effective customer support

70%

of customer queries are handled by the bot

50%

fewer tickets

3+

languages supported by the bot

Company

VanMoof

Product

Industries

Sports

Country

Netherlands

When the two Dutch brothers, Taco and Tiers Carlier, founded VanMoof in 2009, e-bikes were still a futuristic idea in most cities. Since then, their popularity has exploded, and VanMoof is now the world’s fastest-growing e-bike brand.

This surge in popularity  came with some challenges for the innovative company. “How can we still offer the personalized customer service that our clients love, without dramatically increasing costs?” they asked themselves.

The answer: a scalable and customer friendly AI chatbot.

 

Challenge: keeping up with a growing number of customer queries

VanMoof is a growing company, with currently more than 200,000 e-bike riders globally. As the company sold more e-bikes around the world, VanMoof also started receiving more questions from customers. Since VanMoof is located in the Benelux region, their agents handle queries in multiple languages.

The rise in recurrent questions presented two challenges for the service team: keeping up with the increased number of questions, while still offering personalized service in the customers’ preferred language.

 

Solution: implementing an AI chatbot for scalable customer care

After analyzing the incoming queries, VanMoof realized that most of them were recurring, easy-to-answer questions that could be automated. This was one of the main reasons why VanMoof started thinking about using a chatbot solution.

Customer quote - VanMoof

They knew that by automating these inquiries, they’d be able to support customers faster and in multiple languages without losing that personal touch, and without the need to grow their customer service department proportionally.

In order to implement a scalable, personable, and multi-language solution, VanMoof partnered with Chatlayer by Sinch. Together, they implemented a conversational AI bot named “Boost” (in honor of one of the speed buttons on their bikes).

VanMoof integrated the chatbot Boost, and it went live within three months of mapping out the project.

 

Results: fast, cost-effective customer care

Boost can handle more than 70% of customer queries in four languages and helps prevent many handovers to live chat agents.

Of course, when necessary, the chatbot also makes sure that the riders can smoothly transfer over to an agent. If that’s the case, the agent already has the customer’s name, e-mail, frame number, open orders, and more relevant details.

The handover of information from the bot makes sure that the agents are already prepared when they start talking to a customer and can provide a quicker answer.

With Boost as their conversational AI solution, VanMoof has improved its customer experience and scaled its customer service while keeping costs low.

And as VanMoof is always looking for ways to improve its customer service, their next step is to put Boost on their rider’s app.  

With the chatbot, we are able to handle a lot more questions in different languages than before, without having to increase the number of agents.
Fenne de Beer
Project Manager, VanMoof