How Petite Amélie Reclaimed their CX with Zendesk AI

Petite Amélie has spent more than 15 years crafting an international presence, providing specialised baby furniture and wooden toys across five core European markets—the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—supported by an office in the Netherlands and local customer service hubs based inside their concept stores. Because their target group spans from “minus 6 months” to early childhood, providing empathetic and seamless support to parents-to-be is central to their brand identity.

However, scaling across multiple borders introduced logistical complexities. When supply chain disruptions hit a few of their key markets in 2024, the surge in incoming customer queries pushed their legacy support model to its limits. At its peak, a single market was drowning in 1,100 tickets with only three people available to handle the volume, forcing the entire office to step in and assist.

A Surging Backlog and Fragmented Operations

Seeking an immediate fix to their crisis, Petite Amélie turned to an external implementation partner, who advised them to quickly launch an email-based chatbot automation. Instead of relieving the team, the solution created an even larger bottleneck. The bot suffered severe routing flaws, serving incorrect information across mixed international rules—such as feeding French customers answers based on Dutch policies.

Customer service SLAs completely broke down. A response window that normally took 24 hours began taking up to four weeks, causing significant brand damage and intense customer frustration. “And it took us, I think, almost 7 months to really recover our customer service SLAs, where we normally answer within 24 hours. At one point, it took us 4 weeks to come back to customers. It was, of course, really brand damaging,” explains Miami-van der Borden.

Compounded by a warehouse relocation that triggered a second wave of support spikes, agents began operating in isolated silos. Without proper centralisation or unified system training, individual agents began bypassing the platform altogether, keeping private lists of macros in personal Excel sheets.

Organisation Redesign, Platform Optimisation, and AI Automation

Recognising that their fragmented setup was no longer sustainable, Petite Amélie partnered closely with their Zendesk account team to completely re-evaluate their support infrastructure. In response, Zendesk offered a dedicated, structured intervention via the CX Acceleration program to audit and rebuild the brand’s customer service operations.

Led by a Zendesk engagement lead, the team kicked off an intensive diagnostic phase, speaking directly with agents to pinpoint systemic issues like unused auto-translation capabilities. As CEO Patrick Miami-van der Borden noted, “You guys don’t go in and fix it, you go in, you look, and then you teach people how to fix it, I’ve been really, really impressed.”

The engagement focused on enablement and three primary pillars:

• Organisational Redesign: Petite Amélie freed technical lead Sharon 100% from store duties to focus on platform administration, while appointing a dedicated team lead to manage daily support operations.
• Platform Optimisation: The brand overhauled its routing in Zendesk Support so agents in France can cross-support Dutch queues using auto-translation. Through Zendesk Explore, leadership shifted focus from raw ticket volume to first-contact resolutions and quality assurance.
• AI Automation: Replacing the broken email bot, Petite Amélie deployed “Amélie,” a native Zendesk Guide chat assistant that delivers verified answers directly from a central Help Center.

The Turnaround and Measurable Impact

The six-week programmatic intervention completely stabilised Petite Amélie’s European support ecosystem. By the close of the acceleration engagement, the rolling backlog mountain vanished, dropping from 500 open tickets down to a stable baseline of 50 to 60 handled daily. Core first-response resolution times, which had previously ballooned to four weeks, were restored back to a consistent 24-hour SLA. For escalated, complex second-line tickets requiring deeper operational investigation, queries are now routinely finalized inside a 48-hour window.

The shift to a native automated chat assistant (“Amélie”) fundamentally changed how the team manages customer volume and operational costs. Instead of long, multi-day email exchanges, customers receive instant resolution on public-facing inquiries. Today, the automated chat assistant resolves 25% of all incoming conversations entirely on its own without human intervention. An additional 15% of users self-serve using the knowledge base options before exiting, meaning only 60% of total chat interactions ever require manual escalation to a live agent.

Furthermore, unlocking real-time auto-translation features allowed Petite Amélie to drive significant cost efficiencies across borders. Rather than hiring separate teams for each market, regional agents can now cross-support language queues—enabling French-speaking agents to absorb volume spikes in the Dutch market without increasing total headcount.

Embracing Continuous Improvement

With a healthy, high-performing foundation now in place, Petite Amélie treats Zendesk as a long-term strategic driver for business efficiency. The brand is currently rolling out native Zendesk CSAT tracking—offering localised 3-scale and 5-scale customised satisfaction icons—to actively loop negative customer ratings back to team leads for instant quality assurance escalations.

The next step on their roadmap includes launching backend integrations to connect their automated chat assistant directly into their five European web shops. This will empower the bot to instantly track order data, process trace requests, and pull deep transactional details autonomously.

By teaching their retail teams to view AI not as a threat, but as a mechanism that handles administrative tasks, Petite Amélie ensures its human agents are completely free to focus on what they do best: providing a warm, personal, and exceptional experience for growing families. As Miami-van der Borden notes, “If the AI manages those routine tickets… the team can focus exactly where they are needed most.”