How Haarspullen cut response times by 55% with Neople Hanna

Many e-commerce businesses face increasing challenges in handling customer inquiries efficiently. Haarspullen, a leading store specializing in hair care products, was no exception. With growing customer demands and the addition of more support channels, trying AI seemed like the logical next step. We sat down with Ingrid Poot, Team Lead Customer Service, to hear about their journey of collaborating with Neople upgrade their customer support.

The first AI attempt for customer service support

Since the early days of AI, the team at Haarspullen has been open to experimenting with it, firmly believing it could support their customer service team. They initially integrated another AI tool for chat support, but the results didn’t meet expectations.

Ingrid explains: “Installation took us about a month, but we needed more from it than it could deliver. Especially because we knew how much AI was capable of. That’s when we realized it was better to quit with our own experiment and wait for AI to become more advanced and standardized.”

70-85% of AI projects fail due to poor adoption, misalignment with business needs, or technical challenges. Ease of implementation is crucial and it shouldn't take up too much time to adopt AI, but instead save it. That’s where Neople came in.

After four weeks, Neople Hanna was ready to start working in Slack, where the team collaboratively trained and refined her responses.

Ingrid explains: “We trained Hanna by collaborating with her via Slack, asking her every question our customers ask our support team. This let us check her answers and give feedback on what she needed to improve.”

The next logical step was introducing Hanna to Belco, the team’s contact center. This marked the beginning of training Hanna to respond to emails. By reviewing her answers, whether right or wrong, the team provided feedback to help Hanna improve. Hanna was now ready to interact with Haarspullen’s customers.

Fully automating 44% of incoming questions

The Haarspullen team laid the groundwork for their new digital colleague by onboarding her properly. And it paid off. After just a few weeks, they noticed Hanna was providing many correct answers. The next step? Letting her handle questions automatically. The team started with specific areas of focus.

“We use full automation only when we’re confident that Hanna can answer with 99-100% accuracy.”

Ingrid shares, “We can manually add new options to this group of automated answers. For example, WISMO (Where Is My Order) questions are very easy for Hanna to handle. She can quickly share track-and-trace information and even provide additional advice.”

So far the team has automated 44% of all incoming questions—a process that seemed daunting at first. But the results have proven that the CS team and Hanna together make an unbeatable dream team.

Ingrid shares: “At first, it was a bit scary to fully automate, since we could only check responses afterward. But we get positive feedback from customers, because Hanna responds so quickly. We can confidently say that Hanna is doing a great job.” Thanks to automation the team has reduced the average response time from 18 hours to just 10 hours in one month. A remarkable improvement.

Making measurable impact with Neople Hanna

Beyond automation and faster response times, collaborating with Hanna offered more benefits to the Haarspullen team:

• Higher customer satisfaction: Customers appreciated the faster, more consistent communication.
• Improved team productivity: With time saved, the team could focus on proactive communication and problem-solving, improving overall service.
• Consistent tone of voice: Hanna maintained a friendly and professional tone, even during busy periods, which helped to maintain brand consistency across the whole team.
• Cost efficiency: By adding Hanna to the existing CS team, Haarspullen reduced the need to hire new human agents.

Ingrid explains the benefits they’ve experienced so far: “We managed to reduce the workload for the team, respond more quickly, and transform reactive support into a proactive service engine. We noticed customers really appreciated receiving more detailed updates about their orders.”

Even during peak periods, Hanna remains friendly. When people handle repetitive tasks, they tend to give brief, to-the-point responses. But Hanna helps the team make a difference here too. She always maintains a positive tone, wishing customers a happy weekend or happy holidays when it’s appropriate.

Scaling AI with more automations, channels and advice

Now, Haarspullen is planning to further expand Hanna's capabilities. Hanna is already helping new CS employees onboard quickly, making it easier for them to get started. Looking ahead, Ingrid and her team have even higher expectations for their Neople.

Ingrid shares: “We aim to increase Hanna’s knowledge, especially her product expertise, so she can provide better advice and guide customers to the right products. We also hope to expand her activities to include both chat and email, so we can handle an even higher volume of inquiries.”

Promoting Hanna to offer proactive support that delights customers

The next step in automation is allowing Hanna to autonomously cancel orders when needed. The Haarspullen team is currently testing this functionality by enabling Hanna to work directly in both their e-commerce platform Lightspeed and logistics solution Monta.

Ingrid even admits she now gets concerned when her team spends too much time typing. Why? Because Hanna should be stepping in to help. For any business still hesitant to get started with a digital coworker, Ingrid has one final piece of advice:

“I understand the hesitation—we’ve been there too. The biggest doubts are usually about adopting a new digital colleague. But there’s no reason not to take the first step because the results truly speak for themselves.”

Ingrid emphasizes that the key to success is to have someone take responsibility for initiating the collaboration. Once that’s in place, the rest of the team will quickly share enthusiasm. Teams will experience how much time collaboration with a Neople saves, which can be used to solve problems faster and provide proactive customers that delights customers.

Curious to learn more about working with a Neople? Want to understand how they work and what results they can deliver? Request your free demo and we’ll show you how Hanna, Max, Emily and our other Neople are helping our customers take support to the next level.