The company
AG Reederei Norden-Frisia is a German ferry company that carries passengers and vehicles from the North Sea coast to islands such as Norderney and Juist. It sells the tickets, runs the timetable and answers the questions that come with both. Most of that is in German, and most of it comes in the summer.
The problem
Ferry travel to the islands is seasonal. From May the timetable fills up, and so does the inbox: when does the next ferry leave, can I take my car, do I need a ticket for a roof rack, how do I bring my bike. From October to March it goes quiet again. Hiring and training a support team that grows and shrinks with the season is expensive and slow.
The team, led by Frauke Hagen, could see that most of these questions repeat week after week and are already answered in the Zendesk FAQs. They also wanted whatever answered them to feel like part of the crew, not a generic chatbot.
How it runs
Norden-Frisia tried eesel in February 2025. Training on past tickets was the thing that decided the subscription: during the trial week the team connected Zendesk, pulled in the macros and the last three months of tickets, and signed up within days.
They named the bot CaptAIn, Captain plus AI, gave it its own avatar and a greeting in the local dialect: “Moin! Ich bin dein digitaler Reisekapitän. Stelle mir gerne eine Frage!” It runs in three places.
- Zendesk. Tickets and emails to the support address get a reply drafted from the same knowledge, so the everyday timetable and ticket questions are handled without a person.
- The website chat bubble. Passengers ask before they book: departures, prices, vehicles, bikes, who travels free. When the chat cannot be closed, the bot can create a Zendesk ticket so the team picks it up.
- A public chat link. The same CaptAIn, shared as a link, so it can be handed out outside the website.
- The knowledge is the Zendesk help center. The team keeps the FAQs current, and the bots re-sync from Zendesk, so a change to an article about roof racks or disability discounts reaches CaptAIn without retraining.
The setup in numbers
CaptAIn answers from 346 knowledge items: the Zendesk FAQs, the macros and past tickets. It runs on three channels. Ahead of the first high season the plan went from a fixed monthly allowance to 10,000 interactions a month, with the agreement that it scales back down from October to March. That seasonal shape, not a flat annual seat count, is what made the numbers work.
Along the way the team added a second bot, CaptAIn Frida, which reads the same Zendesk help center and has its own Zendesk ticket setup.
What is next
Frauke Hagen leads the support team and runs the eesel setup herself: she checks the conversation history, asks when an answer contradicts the FAQs, and copies fixes from the Zendesk bot to the chat bot on her own. Next on her list is adding the island bus timetables, starting with the Norderney bus website, so CaptAIn can answer the whole trip and not just the crossing. The team is also looking at annual billing.