Getting Neople up and running
Implementation ran through a dedicated onboarding specialist, in one-hour sessions where the team connected everything: Shopify, Freshdesk, Returnista, and DHL, so every piece of order and shipping info could be pulled from one place. "That went pretty easily," Hendrik says.
They started with automatic translations and suggestions (giving agents a draft to approve rather than handing over full control.) In the past few months did they take the next step: real automation, starting with FAQ questions, where Neople reads answers directly from HappyBed's own FAQ pages.
That combination of translations, suggestions, and now FAQ automation already covers a meaningful share of the inbox. The team set a concrete target for the end of 2026: 30% of all incoming questions fully automated end-to-end, plus at least 50% of the remaining suggested replies sent to customers without anyone touching them first, together landing somewhere around 70-80% of tickets handled with zero manual work. The quieter summer months are being used deliberately to train toward that number before Black Friday hits.
WISMO questions ("where is my order?") and returns are next in line for automation. Expansion into France and Scandinavia is also on the roadmap, made easier by the fact that agents already see every question translated into Dutch regardless of which country it came from.
Offering service in different languages
HappyBed's customers write in from the Netherlands, Germany, and France today, with Scandinavia next on the map, plus the occasional English email from further afield. Every question lands in Freshdesk, and Neople translates it automatically, so agents always read questions in their own language no matter where the customer wrote from.
It works the other way too. When Neople drafts a suggested reply, agents see it in Dutch first, so they can judge it properly before it goes anywhere. Once approved, Neople translates it back into the customer's own language and sends it off. Nobody on the team needs to speak German or French; they just need to trust a reply that reads naturally in their own.
"It's really easy to use, right at the bottom of an email, if you just scroll down, it shows the translation, and there's always a suggestion right underneath," Senna explains.
That's also what makes expansion low-risk: whichever market HappyBed enters next, the same Dutch-speaking team can serve it from day one, all inside one place.
Tripling customer service effectiveness
The team that used to handle roughly 700 tickets a week with four people now handles 2,000 with three — and even as volume keeps climbing, headcount hasn't had to grow with it. During Black Friday, that same team fields 4,000-5,000 tickets a week.
What changed wasn't just speed. Before, quality dropped as volume grew — the same templated reply kept going out to different customers. Now the team tracks capacity per person too: around 225 tickets a day per agent, without the corner-cutting that used to hurt customers.
"Our customer service effectiveness has roughly tripled," Hendrik says.
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