// SCALING UP //

“ We now empower customer service within the whole company because of the data we get through Zendesk ,” said Eurail Product Owner , Leonardo Sias , pointing to changes made to the product after the team flagged customer pain points from its vast amount of data .

Take the fact that Eurail historically wouldn ’ t allow customers to move their rail pass onto a different mobile device , in an effort to prevent fraudulent activity ; this became a problem when customers lost or needed new smartphones . “ We would have thousands of requests a week from customers asking to move their pass to another device ,” explained Sias . “ Agents would manually disconnect passes in the back-end , because we can ’ t leave travellers stranded , but the process took a long time . So , we took this as a business case to the company , checked with legal teams and worked with partners to make the technical change to allow customers to do it themselves .”

WE HAVE A CORE OF REALLY WELL-TRAINED AND EXPERIENCED AGENTS WHO CAN FOCUS ON CUSTOMER-RELATED CASES THAT REQUIRE THE HUMAN TOUCH , WHILE WE AUTOMATE THE REST .

travellers can find themselves facing train strikes , cancellations or even having their tickets stolen – and the Eurail customer service team endeavours to be there to help .

From overwhelmed to supercharged

An influx of queries resulting from the post-pandemic travel surge in 2022 left Eurail ’ s agents overwhelmed . But last year , the 65-yearold company took time to transform its customer service department by delving into customer insights from the Zendesk Suite .

“ I ’ m honestly so proud that the company is now more focused on the customer – last year we analysed customer struggles , delved into our insights and worked out what we could improve ,” said Mireille Verweij , Head of Customer Service , who explained how she restructured her team to include senior supervisors with more focus and expertise on pass , reservation and travel queries to action complex queries and oversee the operations .

Simple changes to improve the product have reduced customer enquiries so agents can focus on more pressing problems . In addition , the team is encouraging customers to selfserve , which has seen tickets reduced by more than 50 %.

The company ’ s CSAT score has increased to an impressive 82 %, with Eurail ’ s First Response Time now 3.4 hours , an incredible 95 % faster than only a year ago . Meanwhile , the Full Response Time averages at 14.8 hours , 85 % faster than in 2022 .

Service improvements

Eurail is also working with Zendesk partner , Ultimate , to automate processes using AI . AI is being used to read written customer requests for refunds that would normally not fit into the company policy , flagging certain terms like ‘ emergency ’ or ‘ funeral ’, and escalate them directly to a senior agent who has the authority to process refunds in exceptional circumstances .

Eurail also found another partner through the Zendesk app store , Sparkly , to replace the Excel spreadsheet agents were using to manually fill in customer bank details , which were then sent to Eurail ’ s finance team for processing . Mitigating the risk of human error , Sparkly ’ s API simply plugs into the

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