Before the Help Center, Foodora & Foodpanda relied on direct contact with customer support. The Help Center project reduced contact requests by 55% — effectively cutting Customer Service HR costs by half.

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Can you imagine a better customer service than direct contact with a person? Foodora didn’t either. But, as their operations scaled globally over the last years and merges brought them to 21 countries, the number of customer support agents needed all over the world was getting out of hand.

When I started designing the Help Center project, I had two clear goals in mind: reduce the number of contacts and not frustrate the user in need of help.

There was celebration in the boardroom when the first statistics poured in. In our A/B tests, the Help Center was cutting chat requests by over 50%. People were finding the answers they needed in the content and not requesting the help of a personal agent.

The time spent chatting with agents was also decreased by an average of 9%, meaning that customers who actually needed to contact an agent to solve a problem were better prepared and needed less detailed explanation.

We also tracked trust rates, which remained consistent in A/B testing. It was a success to see that people actually did not miss having agents dedicated to them and were not frustrated by an automated help center.