How Swapfiets’ Support Team Keeps Members Cycling with Aircall

Swapfiets is the world’s first bicycle subscription service, currently operating across eight countries across Europe. On a mission to build more livable cities, the company offers a range of bikes to suit any needs—with two types of pedal bikes and two types of advanced e-bikes, all crafted with durability in mind. Swapfiets bikes are recognized by their iconic blue front tire.

To keep those wheels turning, Swapfiets offer rapid servicing to members, using standardized parts that can be quickly changed, alongside a guarantee to swap the bike out for a new one if it can’t be fixed quickly enough. Flexing those sustainability credentials even further, Swapfiets is striving to establish a 100% circular bike model by 2025—and is already reusing and recycling as many parts as possible. 

Ensuring every cyclist has a smooth experience is essential for Swapfiets, and to match its growing member base the team has over 100 agents offering support every day of the week in six languages. We recently sat down with Project Manager Christoph Eilers to hear about how Swapfiets is using Aircall to build a well-oiled support team and deliver a smooth ride to members. 

Upgrading an Outdated PBX System 

When Chris was first hired to improve the customer service infrastructure, Swapfiets was relying on a legacy PBX system to handle support calls. As he analyzed this existing system and the volume of calls taking place, he quickly recognized that the technology was outdated and expensive compared to more modern solutions. It also lacked the innovative features needed to keep up with customer demands, was awkward to manage, and had poor call quality—none of which sets you up for customer service success!

This spurred Chris to seek a new calling solution that could rapidly adapt to the support team’s needs and enable them to efficiently resolve the 7,000-10,000 calls they receive each week. 

“Our callers usually have an urgent issue to deal with—they’re outside, with a bike, and need assistance. Generally, they don’t want to send an email and wait for a reply. We needed a call solution that would enable us to respond rapidly, and get those riders back in the saddle,” Chris explains. 

Having used Aircall in a previous role, the phone and communication platform was the first port of call for Chris who knew it offered a robust, intuitive, and feature-packed solution—one that would enable agents to deliver a great experience to customers and allow managers to easily track performance. Alongside Aircall’s rich set of tools, Chris also wanted a solution that offered autonomy and wouldn’t require specialist help to use. Swapfiets’ old system was poorly understood by its employees and cumbersome to update. This meant that the team lacked agility and making changes—whether to office hours or onboarding new agents—was painful. 

“One of the biggest benefits of Aircall is the ease of use. With our old PBX system, we required professional assistance every time we wanted to make a change to our call flows or create new numbers. With Aircall, we’re empowered to make those changes ourselves in just a matter of clicks. It means we can keep improving and scaling our service with zero friction,” Chris says. 

While Aircall gives teams autonomy over their call solution, during the initial onboarding Swapfiets also felt fully supported by their dedicated implementation specialist, David. David was on hand to ensure the initial launch of Aircall went smoothly and to quickly connect Chris and the team to the right answers to their questions. 

“I’ve got to give a special shout out to David—he was a blessing, super knowledgeable, and one of the best onboarding specialists that I have ever worked with.” 

Gaining Deep Customer Insights with Analytics+

Alongside the speedy and seamless setup Aircall offers, Chris’ team has been benefiting from Aircall’s powerful Analytics+ features, which offer a bird’s eye view of team performance. 

With Aircall’s analytics and dashboards, Chris and Swapfiets managers can dive into the data, seeing an overview of call activity, specific trends, detailed graphs, information on unanswered calls, and much more. Everything is also logged and documented automatically, meaning they have a source of truth for previous interactions. 

With these insights at their fingertips, Swapfiets’ customer support leaders can make informed decisions about how to grow and improve their service. Meanwhile, top performers in their sales and support teams can be identified and receive the shout outs they deserve—boosting team morale in the process. 

“With Analytics+ and Aircall’s Activity Feed, we can see what’s happening and improve what we’re doing. In fact, using Aircall’s analytics, we were able to spot a shortfall in answered calls during lunch hours. With that intelligence, we quickly adapted our shift pattern to ensure we could meet the spike in demand. We’ve even used Aircall tagging data to inform our product—building new features into the app based on common queries on calls. It’s helping us to build a better service, and a better experience for our members.”

As Chris and the team focus on using best-in-class tools to deliver an incredible experience to members, they’ve also started using HubSpot as their service and marketing platform. The tool’s close integration with Aircall is already helping the support team become even more efficient. With the integration, they can easily log calls alongside specific contacts and tickets in HubSpot—keeping all their information in one place.  

Building a Truly Personalized Experience  

By using Aircall and HubSpot, Swapfiets has been able to start gathering crucial data that enables them to improve critical KPIs including First Call Resolution. However, alongside providing those essential numbers, Aircall also helps support agents deliver a personalized experience that members will remember. And with a young customer demographic and an approachable brand, being able to deliver those interactions with empathy and meaning has been key. 

Fortunately, with Aircall’s pop-up Insight Cards, teams can do just that, helping agents instantly see who is calling (including whether they are a member, a prospect, or a coworker) alongside useful context that helps anticipate their needs. With the ability to add notes to calls and tickets, agents can also share helpful information about contacts with one another. In doing so, they can immediately help—a win-win that gives agents a greater sense of accomplishment and keeps callers happy 

Taking personalization a step further, Swapfiets has even created a custom Interactive Voice Response (IVR) flow with recordings from its own agents. When it comes to the hold music, callers will also be treated to a unique track, created by one of Swapfiets’ very own talented employees—selected through a “beat challenge” set up by the project team (talk about creating buy-in from the outset!). 

“Having the team record the IVRs and holding a competition to see who could produce a track for our hold music was a great way to add that extra personal touch, and build a sense of fun, creativity, and engagement into the work we do,” Chris comments.  

Bringing Bikes—and Smiles—to More Members 

Looking ahead, Chris will be exploring how he can take the benefits of Aircall even further, with new features like AI-powered call and voicemail transcription which can provide greater transparency over customer interactions and further insights which can be used to improve their service. 

As Chris and the Swapfiets team continue to grow and bring more bikes to members the world over, Aircall will be riding in tandem—ready to help with every interaction along the road. 

Ready to transform your approach to customer support? Try Aircall today.