27,000 loan tickets a month, sorted and drafted in German

smava is a Berlin comparison platform for German consumer credit, founded in 2007. It compares offers from more than 20 partner banks for loans between 1,000 and 120,000 euros. In 2021 it acquired Finanzcheck, a Hamburg loan marketplace. The two brands run customer support out of one Zendesk.

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About 27,000 tickets a month come into that Zendesk, almost all in German, from two brands with their own macros and advisors. Every ticket needs a category from a fixed list written into a Zendesk field, and a reply that says what the approved macro says. This is regulated finance, so wording matters: a reply that promises something the team will do, names a competitor, or guesses at a loan the company can no longer see does harm.

Some tickets belong to a person from the start. A customer who already has a credit advisor should hear from that advisor, not from an automatic reply.

smava has run eesel on its Zendesk since December 2024; the current three-agent setup went live in June 2026. eesel works from about 820 macros and help center articles synced from Zendesk, a category mapping document the team wrote, and smava’s banking wiki. Each agent has one job and a list of things it must never do.

• Categorisation agent. On every new ticket and comment it tags the language, reads the ticket’s advisor field, and marks the ticket eligible for an automatic reply only when no advisor is assigned. Then it picks one category from the mapping document, judging by intent, and writes it into two Zendesk fields. It never leaves notes or changes anything else.
• Drafting agent. Its only output is a draft reply with Approve and Reject buttons. It assumes a macro exists, lists the library, searches by intent, situation and brand, and reads every candidate in full before choosing. smava macros for smava tickets, FC macros for Finanzcheck, the body used word for word. If nothing fits it has three exits in order: refer a disbursed loan to the partner bank, ask for clarification, or send the interim notice. It may not claim to have searched unless it did, and may never say it does not know or that a human will step in.
• Two reply agents, one per brand. For eligible tickets they prepare one customer-ready reply and nothing else. Gender-neutral greeting with the customer’s full name, never Herr or Frau. Always “wir”, never “ich”. No signature, because Zendesk adds one. No link to check24 or verivox. No promise that the team will check, forward or arrange anything, and no claim to have attached a document. Every reply ends with one of four fixed closing sentences. A message in any language other than German or English gets the standard reply asking the customer to write in one of those two.
• People stay in control. An agent changes a draft by writing @eesel in an internal note, and eesel reruns the whole macro search before it redrafts. A ticket with attachments goes to a person with a note instead of a draft.

Between 8 August and 8 September 2026 eesel handled about 27,000 Zendesk tickets for smava and Finanzcheck, between 5,700 and 6,800 in each full week. The categorisation agent ran on about 14,600 of them and set about 23,000 tags. eesel prepared about 15,300 draft replies, ran about 14,400 searches across the macros and help center, and left about 800 internal notes.

The split shows where the work sits. The drafting agent, whose output waits for a person to approve, ran on about 12,200 tickets. The two reply agents, which only take tickets where the customer has no advisor, ran on about 1,100. Most of the month was eesel doing the sorting and the first draft, and a person doing the sending.

Tanja van Treel leads Customer Success at smava. The setup has one obvious dial: the share of tickets marked eligible for an automatic reply, decided today by a single field and covering about 1,100 of the 27,000. The categorisation, the macro search and the draft already run on their own, and every rule lives in the agents’ instructions, so changing what eesel may say is a text edit, not a project.