How Nelly reduced contact rates by nearly 30% while maintaining 100% SLA compliance

Delivering trend-setting fashion to young women across the Nordics and Germany requires a fast, digitally native support model. Nelly, a major fashion e-commerce destination based in Gothenburg, Sweden, designs its own trendy clothing lines while curating a handpicked selection of popular international brands. With a high volume of customer interactions across multiple markets, delivering rapid, localised support across email and live chat is essential.

“My role as CX Development Manager is looking over our processes and systems to find ways to make our team more efficient, while identifying customer pain points and driving improvements overall,” explains Pierre Albert, Customer Experience Development Manager at Nelly.

Historically, handling peak seasonal surges meant relying on student workers and frequently closing live chat to clear mounting email queues.

Transitioning to generative AI across Chat and Email

Recognizing that traditional, non-generative chatbots were no longer keeping pace with customer expectations, Nelly made a strategic decision to transition to generative AI embedded directly within its existing Zendesk workspace.

“We went from a non-generative chatbot and knew we were behind on AI, so we needed a generative AI solution,” Albert notes. “One main reason we went with Zendesk was thinking it would be good to have everything in the same system that our team was already using.”

Because email represents Nelly’s largest contact channel across all markets, the company adopted a dual-automation strategy. They deployed an AI Agent for live chat across the Nordics and Germany, alongside an AI Ticket Bot to automatically triage and resolve inbound email tickets. By connecting Zendesk AI to Nelly’s established knowledge base, the automated agents quickly took ownership of high-frequency Tier-1 inquiries, such as order lookups and “Where is my order?” (WISMO) tracking queries.

Building self-sufficiency in 1 month with Cloudhuset

To ensure a rapid and seamless transition, Nelly partnered with the Zendesk technical partner, Cloudhuset. Leveraging existing API connections from their previous chatbot and conducting collaborative remote working sessions over Microsoft Teams, the team completed the entire setup in roughly four weeks.

“The implementation went much smoother than I expected,” Albert shares. “Cloudhuset wasn’t only solving issues; we were learning how to do it ourselves going forward. We now feel like we have the knowledge to set up new APIs and create new dialogue flows independently.”

To mitigate operational risk during launch, Nelly deployed progressively—starting with chat in Sweden, spending a week making help center refinements, and then switching on both chat and ticket AI Agents across the remaining Nordic and German markets.

Driving lower contact rates while maintaining 100% SLA compliance

Shifting routine transactional conversations to Zendesk AI produced instant, measurable gains across Nelly’s core support metrics. From June through August, 62% of Nelly’s chat conversations were handled through Automated Resolutions, comprising 46% verified resolutions and 16% contained resolutions. Verified resolutions indicate the customer issue was resolved, while contained resolutions reflect conversations that ended without a verified resolution but may not represent a fully solved issue. Live-agent contacts per order dropped from a baseline of 8.4% (84 agent contacts per 1,000 orders) down to an average of 6.6%, reaching 5.9% (59 contacts per 1,000 orders) in recent months—a total reduction of nearly 30%.

At the same time, Nelly maintained a 100% SLA achievement rate across all markets, upholding its commitment to reply within 48 hours on weekdays. Furthermore, because AI handled the heavy lifting across email queues, Nelly was able to extend live chat availability well beyond its previous four-hour daily limit while drastically reducing its reliance on temporary student rotators.

“During the same period last year, we achieved 100 percent SLA, but that was by using a lot of our part-time workers and by closing our live chat to handle emails,” Albert explains. “Now, we’ve been able to keep live chat open even longer because the AI takes such a large part of the load.”

Elevating human care through Copilot and AI translation

Automating repetitive transactional tasks has completely transformed the daily workload for Nelly’s human agents. Instead of spending time on routine status checks, agents can now dedicate their time and mental energy to complex, gray-area inquiries—such as missing package items, warehouse discrepancies, or potential fraud checks.

To support agents during these higher-tier interactions, Nelly activated Zendesk Copilot capabilities. Real-time AI translations allow Swedish-speaking agents to reply seamlessly to customers across the Nordics and Germany in their native languages (Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, German, or English). Meanwhile, automatic ticket summaries condense long conversation threads instantly, and intelligent intent triage automatically routes urgent requests—such as order cancellations—directly to high-priority queues.

“Before, I had not used the Admin Center much because it was mainly handled by our system admin. Since we got Admin Copilot, I find myself there much more often. It’s easier to navigate, but more importantly, I can now independently resolve things I would previously have needed help with. It’s intuitive, gives clear step-by-step guidance, and works well for both first-time and experienced users,” says Albert.