FreshdeskThe company
Original Bootcamp runs eight-week outdoor fitness camps in parks across Germany, in any weather, with a fixed weekly group and a personal trainer. It started in Cologne in November 2009 as a women-only Bikini Bootcamp and became Original Bootcamp in 2011. Today the site lists 227 trainers in 52 cities, plus fitness trips around Europe. A member who cannot make a session can cancel 24 hours ahead and collect a "Bookie" to use later.
The problem
A lot of what reaches the Freshdesk inbox is general: what does a camp cost, how do Bookies work, can I train in another city, what happens after a trial session. Those are all answered on the website. The rest is personal, about a specific booking or account, and needs someone with access to the member system.
The team wanted the first kind answered quickly, in the same informal German tone the brand uses, without eesel ever promising to do something to a booking that only a person can do.
How it runs
Original Bootcamp connected Freshdesk and its website to eesel in June 2026. It is a small setup: one agent, one filter, and a set of instructions on tone and on what to hand off.
- The filter is written in German and does one job: let through only the tickets that can be answered from the knowledge base without looking at the member system. It also skips spam, automatic replies and missed-call notices.
- Answers are short. Four sentences, "du", no long preambles, and never a line explaining what it cannot do. It links to the relevant page on the website, one link at most, and never to internal help articles.
- Everything about an account goes to the team, and eesel says so. It never claims to enter a Bookie, make a booking or change anything. The wording is always that it is passing the request to the customer service team, who will confirm.
- Health comes first. If a message mentions an injury or illness, it goes to a person even if the booking question could have been answered.
- The team can also @mention eesel on any Freshdesk ticket to bring it in, and each weekday morning at 9am Berlin time it reviews the workspace and emails a short note to the owner.
A month of work
Between 8 August and 8 September 2026 the filter let 31 Freshdesk tickets through to eesel. It is early days: the setup ran at higher volume in June and July, went quiet over August, and picked up again in September as the team tuned the filter. The knowledge behind it is about 1,700 pages from original-bootcamp.com and 1,100 Freshdesk tickets and articles.
What is next
The line eesel does not cross today is the member system. Anything about a booking, a payment or a Bookie goes to a person, because eesel cannot see the account.
Original Bootcamp is building an API onto that backend over the next couple of months. Once eesel can reach it, the filter can open up, and the questions that are handed over today become ones eesel can handle on its own. Christoph Adelmann and the eesel team are working through it together, so the setup fits the way their system actually works.