Directplant.nl saves 1 FTE and increases customer satisfaction
How do you increase customer satisfaction while keeping workload low during peak season?
Directplant.nl is an online garden center that delivers a wide range of garden plants and tools directly to customers’ homes. Most customers are from the Netherlands and Belgium, but Directplant.nl now also delivers to Germany. The company is known for strong, competitively priced plants, short communication lines, and a customer service team that responds quickly.
The challenge
Before implementing AI Agent Jasmijn, Directplant.nl received a large number of questions daily via email and phone. A significant part of these were simple, recurring questions, for example about delivery costs and times. This took up a lot of time for the customer service team and created high workload. In addition, many questions came in outside office hours, making immediate responses impossible. Directplant.nl therefore sought a solution to reduce workload, increase availability, and provide customers with faster answers.
The solution: AI Agent Jasmijn
Directplant.nl chose Watermelon because of its user-friendliness and the ability to fully train the AI Agent on their own content. The implementation of Jasmijn was outsourced due to a lack of internal capacity, allowing a Watermelon employee to quickly and fully set up the agent. The Dutch agent went live first, followed by a German version.
Jasmijn now handles most of the simple questions and refers customers with more complex inquiries to customer service. Thanks to website integration, Jasmijn can directly share relevant product pages, blogs, or information pages, helping customers quickly find the right information.
“The time savings it delivers are really significant. Without the AI Agent, we would have simply needed an extra person.“
Results
In the first full calendar year, AI Agent Jasmijn handled over 10,000 conversations, averaging nearly 1,000 per month. As many as 65% of these took place outside office hours, giving customers immediate answers in the evenings and on weekends. This saved approximately one full-time employee’s worth of time, allowing the customer service team to focus on more complex and content-heavy questions. And above all, the team now has more time to enjoy the outdoors and the animals on the premises.
This has noticeably improved the quality of responses. In addition, Jasmijn helps customers find the right information faster by functioning as a search feature within the website, significantly improving content discoverability.
Customer experience
Customers notice that Directplant.nl’s service is more in line with their needs. Since simple questions are answered directly by Jasmijn, employees have more time for complex or specific requests. This results in more detailed and tailored answers. Customers also experience the interaction with Jasmijn as natural and pleasant, which increases trust in the service. The result: smoother communication and a lasting positive impression.
Future plans
Directplant.nl sees opportunities to expand Jasmijn to other channels, such as Facebook, where an active community of 30,000 members already exists. They are also exploring integration with the order system, so customers will be able to check their order status via the AI Agent in the future.