“The tools Zendesk offers has increased the effectiveness of our agents, raising our NPS score, lowering the time we spend per ticket and allowing us to help more customers in a more effective manner.”
Mike Reissaus
Senior Operations Agent at Hellorider
“We’re growing a lot, and our operations agents are happier to work for us – a few of them remember how chaotic it was using Hubspot. Now it’s clear for them how to access the relevant information and satisfy the customer.”
Maarten Koornstra
Head of Operations at Hellorider
HQ
Amsterdam, NL
Founded
2020
Agents
6
Handle time per ticket
10.5 min
55.31%
One-touch tickets
~20%
improvement in cost per ticket
~20%
cost efficiency savings per year
2.5 minutes
First Response Time
Cycling into success
The rise of Hellorider in the Netherlands
Conjure up an image of the Netherlands in your mind. Do you see fields of cheerful tulips and jolly windmills? Bridges crossing the hundreds of canals in the capital Amsterdam? If you look carefully, you’ll probably see a bicycle or two – or realistically, 20! The Dutch are as famous for their pedal power, as they are for their tulips and cheese.
The nation’s love for two-wheeled transportation only became more popular in January 2020 when the government introduced tax incentives to encourage more bicycle travel, including interest-free loans and the option to lease a bike from the company you work for – similar to employee company car schemes.
Five business-savvy individuals saw the opportunity to create corporate bicycle leasing company Hellorider in April 2020. The SaaS platform connects the dots between the four parties involved in leasing bikes – the employee (or rider), the employer, the bicycle dealer and the car leasing company which draws up the legal contracts for the bicycle leases. Hellorider looks after the entire management of the leasing experience from customer onboarding, to delivery, maintenance, and customer care.
Having navigated the pandemic, this fast-growing start-up is now catching the attention of investors with an annual growth of 150% and contracts with over 30 of the biggest car leasing companies. Serving over 300,000 riders and connecting them with 1,500 bicycle dealers, Hellorider is in constant motion, answering questions from their ever-growing pool of customers and stakeholders.
“We want to make sure everyone is happy and everyone has a very good experience leasing a bicycle through the Hellorider software, with customers getting the service they want and being helped immediately,” explains Maarten Koornstra, Head of Operations.
When Hellorider was first set up, the decision was made to use Hubspot for sales, marketing and operations, but they switched to Zendesk in November 2023 for customer experience and support after agents found it difficult to label incoming messages to categorise the four customer types.
“We also wanted the ability to integrate with our own software using an API to make sure we could oversee the writing of contracts and that wasn’t possible with Hubspot.”
Self-serving customers
Once implemented, Hellorider’s knowledge base was imported into the Zendesk Suite with an AI chatbot to quickly direct customers to the relevant articles to aid their query.
“The AI agent asks what type of user you are and gives you answers immediately, summarising every article,” he explains. Hellorider saw a 27% decline in all incoming tickets when it began steering customers towards its improved knowledge base and AI chatbot solution. “We were growing in customer numbers, but we were seeing a decline in calls and an increase in AI interactions.”
Those who needed further support could connect with one of Hellorider’s six agents more quickly as they were freed up by customers self-serving using the comprehensive knowledge base.
Increased NPS score
The platform’s NPS score has been climbing over time, from 30 to 39 (outstanding in the leasing world). Koornstra puts this down to the use of Zendesk AI and tools, alongside the API integration of the platform with its own software: “Every time someone gets in touch who has an existing leasing contract with us, our agents now have all the information immediately.”
Koornstra recalls a time that a customer engaged with the AI agent saying they had an accident with the leased bicycle; “Immediately they were given the relevant information to get in touch with the bicycle dealer to create a damage report,” Koornstra describes. “One of our human agents quickly called the customer as the ticket was flagged as high importance due to damage, but was told they already had all the information from the AI bot – a case that would have taken one working day to fix now only takes an hour with AI.”
Mike Reissaus, Senior Operations Agent at Hellorider confirms, “The use of Zendesk tools has increased the effectiveness of our agents, raising our NPS score, lowering the time we spend per ticket and allowing us to help more customers in a more effective manner.”
Keeping headcounts low
Koornstra and his team are constantly fine-tuning their Zendesk tool use, adding new categories, tags and macros and feeding the knowledge base. “The knowledge base is very important to our future growth, as we can keep our agent headcount low and encourage self-service. From the moment we implemented Zendesk we had a decline in incoming cases – it’s so much more user-friendly than Hubspot for customer support.”
Two agents are now able to fully dedicate their time to dealing with complex queries and managing the leasing companies. “If a rider has a problem that their dealer can’t solve they go to their employer and then the employer goes to the leasing company, who pays for the Hellorider software, so it’s important to ensure the leasing companies are satisfied,” explains Koornstra, who says that thanks to the partnership between Hellorider and Zendesk, agents can now anticipate when problems might arise (such as the wrong bike being delivered) and prevent cases being escalated.
He continued: “We’re growing a lot, and our operations agents are happier to work for us – a few of them remember how chaotic it was using Hubspot. Now it’s clear for them how to access the relevant information and satisfy the customer.”
“Zendesk has had a very positive impact on our business,” he concludes. “The fact that we have increased our NPS since we started using Zendesk is clear evidence – and now we’re scalable, so we can grow more because we have a good way of handling things in Zendesk to ensure that everything is done correctly, works correctly and is answered correctly.”
