Playtomic ups its CX game with Zendesk AI

Playtomic, a SaaS-enabled marketplace for racket sports players based in Spain, is revolutionizing how players book courts, find partners, and compete.

Racket sports players in more than 50 countries use Playtomic to make court reservations, join classes, handle payments, and find playing partners. The online sports facilities booking platform features more than 5,200 partner clubs, 22,000 courts, and over 3 million players with a passion for racket sports.

With more than 1.5 million active monthly users, including key markets like Spain, Italy, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and several countries across Africa. Playtomic needed a solution to handle its rapid growth and the increasing demands placed on customer support.

Prior to Zendesk, Playtomic used Intercom as its support solution but the technology had significant limitations. “The bot couldn’t personalize responses, lacked generative AI, and failed to transition effectively to human agents,” explains Giulio Castiglioni, Director of Customer Care at Playtomic. “About 60% of queries were deflected, but many customers were left frustrated without their issues resolved.”

The team spent six months evaluating various AI options. Ultimately, Playtomic chose Zendesk AI based on its strong capabilities in personalization, handover to human agents, analytics, and generative AI responses.

“It filled critical gaps like coherent generative responses and seamless integration with our backend systems,” says Castiglioni.

The partnership between Zendesk and Playtomic has delivered an AI-powered hybrid strategy that combines advanced automation with personalized human support. The Zendesk AI agent handles common queries, integrates with backend systems, and escalates more complex technical issues or international payment problems to human agents.

Also, the AI agent leverages Zendesk large language models to answer specific questions based on data from Playtomic’s internal knowledge bases. Currently, the AI agent is replying in nine languages to accommodate the company’s growing global reach.

“We are using AI not only to prevent tickets, but also as a copilot for our agents, helping them write faster and better messages with support from generative AI,” offers Castiglioni.

The implementation of AI has enabled Playtomic to scale its customer support operations more efficiently, handling a 40 percent increase in conversation volume with only a 5 percent increase in human agent headcount.

Playtomic views Zendesk AI as a strategic investment to support the company’s rapid growth, allowing the team to provide better service to customers without the need to proportionately expand the number of human agents.

“Instead of spending on new hirings and new onboarding, we have invested that money in an automated solution,” says Castiglioni.

For Playtomic, AI is more than a tool for automation—it’s a way to enhance the overall support experience.

“We’ve always seen artificial intelligence as an opportunity to work more productively with lower ticket volumes, allowing our agents to provide more quality in their conversations with customers,” shares Ashlee Harbert, Customer Experience and Automation Manager at Playtomic.

Harbert is also pleased that Zendesk AI allows the company to provide quality support 24/7. “It lets us offer continuous service outside of business hours,” says Harbert.

Since implementing Zendesk AI, Playtomic has seen impressive results.

In its B2C channel, Playtomic has deployed 81 AI agent intents and is achieving a deflection rate of around 83 percent. This has allowed Playtomic’s human agents to focus on providing more personalized service to customers.

In its B2B channel, Playtomic is using the AI agent to triage and route conversations to the appropriate teams, with plans to expand the AI agent’s functionality to handle more self-service inquiries.

“Zendesk AI didn’t just transform our daily operations—it gave us the ability to scale with quality and efficiency,” shares Castiglioni. ‘We’ve created a customer experience aligned with our global growth aspirations.”

Playtomic recently launched a refund API integrated with Zendesk, enabling customers to access their refund history effortlessly, while significantly reducing workload on support agents. The results have been impressive: 80 percent of refund queries are now resolved through automation, with only 20 percent requiring human intervention.

Overall, 77 percent of Playtomic’s CSAT-surveyed customers have expressed satisfaction with the automated responses provided by AI agents.

“We want to automatically solve 50 percent of tickets, so that the remaining half can be managed in double the time, with more channels, and a premium support model in B2B,” explains Castiglioni.

Looking ahead, Playtomic is expanding its AI capabilities. “We are using AI not only to prevent tickets, but also as a copilot for our agents, helping them write faster and better messages,” adds Castiglioni. “Our next step is to implement Zendesk for Quality Assurance (QA), ensuring every interaction meets our standards.”

With tools like Zendesk AI, Playtomic is solidifying its position as a leader in sports technology, delivering solutions that not only meet–but exceed–user expectations.

“It’s exciting to see how each improvement brings us closer to our vision of being the best platform for sports lovers,” Harbert concludes.