Case Study
Swapfiets: Achieve strong growth while delivering a seamless service experience
About Swapfiets
Swapfiets is a Dutch company that offers a subscription service for bicycles. For a fixed monthly fee, users are always guaranteed to have a bike at their disposal.
"Before we started using Zendesk, I doubted whether we could provide all our new customers with a great service experience. But with the right tools, our customer service operation can keep up with our company's growth ambitions."
Case Study
The concept was introduced in the Netherlands in 2014, and five years later, it became available in Germany, Belgium, and Denmark. Swapfiets also recently welcomed its 100,000th customer. One of its secret weapons, according to Peter Voor de Wind, Global Customer Service Manager, is delivering exceptionally good service.
Swapfiets was founded by three friends who realized that people wanted to own a bike without worrying about flat tires or broken lights. That’s why service and maintenance are included in the subscription. It turned out to be a fantastic idea. After initially using refurbished bikes, the company now designs its own bicycles, all featuring an iconic blue front tire. This detail was inspired by the famous blue pottery Delft, the city where Swapfiets was founded, is known for.
“At Swapfiets, we have a clear vision for customer service: we want to be the friend in your phone when you have an issue with your bike,” says Voor de Wind. When he joined Swapfiets in 2017, customer service was organized locally. However, there was no data, insights, or history of customer interactions, and the process was far from efficient. That’s when he decided to centralize customer service.
“This is also where Zendesk came into the picture,” says Voor de Wind. “Or rather, it already had, but the solution hadn’t been implemented yet. Swapfiets’s founders chose Zendesk because they wanted a solution that could keep up with the company’s growth and scale alongside it. The fact that, as a small startup, they wanted to partner with an established company like Zendesk shows how ambitious they were.”
Insights to Enhance Customer Service Operations
Implementing Zendesk was a top priority for Voor de Wind: “I wanted to gain insights as quickly as possible to improve our customer service operations. At the time, our customer service teams were decentralized, with each team responsible for a specific region within a country. This meant that every team operated from a regional location with its own phone number and email inbox. Regional teams also used physical phones to respond to WhatsApp messages from customers. Additionally, customers could reach us through Facebook and Twitter. However, due to the different locations and the lack of a centralized solution, there was no unified overview of these interactions. This led to situations where customers were asked the same questions multiple times across various channels.”
Integrating WhatsApp with Zendesk changed everything
With Zendesk, Swapfiets can now collect and integrate data from all customer conversations handled by its hundred service employees across various channels. These insights enable the company to provide customers with a seamless service experience. However, the game-changer for Swapfiets was the integration of WhatsApp with Zendesk. “Previously, only two colleagues per region could handle WhatsApp messages at the same time—one via the app on a phone and another via WhatsApp on a desktop. You can imagine how thrilled we were when Zendesk selected us as the first Dutch customer to test the WhatsApp integration with Zendesk. We’re still incredibly grateful for that. Today, 30% of our customer interactions happen via WhatsApp, and thanks to Zendesk, it works flawlessly,” says Voor de Wind enthusiastically.
“The fact that Zendesk offers WhatsApp integration allows us at Swapfiets to fulfill our promise of being a friend in your phone when you have an issue with your bike. Providing fast and efficient WhatsApp support within our service channels was a major milestone for us.”
Focus on the development of Self-Service
“Since we started using Zendesk, our customer service has improved significantly,” says Voor de Wind. “We were able to easily centralize our customer service operations from multiple small locations to four major cities in different countries. Additionally, we’ve become much faster and have a better understanding of what our customers need. For instance, we’ve learned that customers don’t actually want to contact the service department at all. This insight has driven us to focus more on developing self-service options, which we hope will provide an even better customer experience. We’ve also discovered that many customer inquiries address topics that could easily be added to an FAQ. That’s something we’re currently working on—adding the right content to the knowledge base for each region. We’re also exploring the use of a chatbot. As customers start using self-service more, our service agents will have more time to handle complex issues.”
To further enhance the self-service experience, Swapfiets is also working on developing its own app. The goal is to allow customers to schedule maintenance appointments directly through the app. Developers are exploring ways to integrate the maintenance database to make this possible. The future of Swapfiets is all about growth in every possible way. The company aims to triple its customer base by the end of the year and expand the number of bicycles in use in Germany to 150,000. Offering business subscriptions and pursuing further international expansion are also key drivers of growth.
