RESERVA users get support in Japanese from the manual and past tickets, and a Zendesk ticket when they need a person

Controlgroup is a Tokyo holding company, set up in April 2021, whose operating company Control Technology has run the RESERVA booking system since 2014. RESERVA lets a business take bookings online, manage customers, take payment and send notifications, with a free plan to start. The site says more than 350,000 organisations use it, from nail salons to universities and city governments.

Visit Controlgroup at reserva.be →

RESERVA has six booking types and seven plans, and the same question can have a different answer for each. A support answer has to know which one the customer runs before it says anything, and it has to use the exact names of the screens and buttons in the product, because a paraphrase sends someone looking for a menu that does not exist.

The support team already had the answers written down, in the manual on support.reserva.be, in past Zendesk tickets and in macros. The chat had to use those and nothing else, in polite Japanese, and hand the rest to a person cleanly.

Controlgroup connected the support site and Zendesk to eesel in June 2026 and put the chat on support.reserva.be. eesel reads about 880 pages of the manual, about 500 Zendesk tickets and macros, and 13 files the team wrote. Solved and closed Zendesk tickets are synced every morning at 9am Tokyo time so recent answers reach the bot.

• Ask before answering. The chat always establishes three things first: customer or prospect, booking type, plan. If the visitor already said them, it does not ask again.
• Prospects are handed over, not answered. Pre-sales questions go to a person. The bot collects contact details and opens a Zendesk ticket, tagged so the team can see where it came from, with an internal note summarising the chat.
• Japanese, always. Replies are in polite business Japanese, even when the question comes in another language.
• Exact names, exact steps. Screen names, button labels and step order come from the manual as written. Where sources disagree, the manual wins. It does not invent troubleshooting steps the manual does not have.
• Contracts and money go to people. Plan overviews and pricing can be answered from public information. Contract changes, invoices, refunds and cancellations are handed to Zendesk.

Between 8 August and 8 September 2026 the chat handled 16 conversations, ran a knowledge search on each, and opened 7 Zendesk tickets for the team, each tagged and with an internal note. The numbers are small; the setup is new and the team is still tuning the instructions.