Swiss Casinos bets on Zendesk AI to meet CX challenges

Founded in 1970 and headquartered in Zurich, Swiss Casinos AG operates both physical and online gaming experiences. The company’s online casino is among the few licensed operators in Switzerland, offering a wide variety of games including poker, slots, blackjack, and roulette.

Swiss Casinos Holding AG is its parent company, owning casinos in Pfäffikon, Schaffhausen, and Zurich, and holding a majority stake in the St. Gallen casino. The company also offers services for casino planning, construction, and operation, as well as management support for its casino locations.

The high-stakes challenge of 24/7 CX

What sets Swiss Casinos apart in a crowded and regulated market isn’t just its game library—it’s the customer experience.

“Our strategy from the beginning was to differentiate from competitors through 24/7, 365-day customer support,” explains Raphael Grossenbacher, Head of Customer Support at Swiss Casinos. “We aim to deliver the highest standards of support so that players don’t just enjoy our games—they feel taken care of, any time of day.”

Operating in a dynamic and highly regulated industry and ensuring fast and reliable support isn’t just a service goal—it’s a compliance and customer trust necessity. That commitment to 24/7 service, however, comes with challenges.

Support agents need broad knowledge across the business—from game mechanics and promotions to backend tools and responsible gaming protocols. Compounding the complexity, ticket volumes surge during peak winter seasons, historically reducing efficiency by up to 30 percent. Those issues led the Swiss Casinos team to look for a better CX platform.

“For example, we had agents working solo during night shifts, and they had to be able to troubleshoot complex issues without access to other departments,” recalls Grossenbacher. “Plus, our tools were fragmented. We used Thunderbird for email, a separate tool for phone calls, and a terrible chat tool. We tracked unresolved cases with Teams boards. It was messy and manual—and it made mistakes inevitable.”

Hitting the jackpot with Zendesk AI

To streamline its customer service operations, Swiss Casinos turned to Zendesk. By centralizing communication channels and deploying AI-driven tools, the company created a unified support experience across email, chat, and phone.

Zendesk’s AI Copilot features—combined with a powerful internal knowledge base, AI-assisted writing tools, and automation—transformed the support operation into a scalable, data-driven engine. One key element of the transformation was the rollout of “Ace,” an AI-powered agent that now handles 40 to 50 percent of all chat inquiries.

“Our initial goal was to automate 50 percent of chat inquiries—and we reached it,” says Grossenbacher. “The AI agent helped us break the seasonal peaks. Last winter, for the first time, our first-response and resolution times stayed constant.”

Another standout feature for Swiss Casinos is Zendesk’s AI-assisted writing tools. These features help agents craft grammatically correct, friendly responses with just a few clicks—essential when delivering empathetic, multilingual support at all hours.

“One of our agents started with a CSAT score of around 90 percent,” shares Grossenbacher. “Once he started using the AI writing tools—just clicking ‘make it more friendly’—his CSAT jumped to 98 percent. That’s the kind of significant impact these tools have.”

Managing growth without growing pains

The documented results that Swiss Casinos experienced from Zendesk AI were both immediate and measurable:

— A 40 to 50 percent automation rate for chat inquiries thanks to the company’s AI agent “Ace”

— A 30 percent-plus efficiency gain during seasonal peak periods

— No increase in customer support headcount, despite 30 percent business growth over two years

— An increase in CSAT scores from 4.0 to 4.5 out of 5 across the support team

— Individual agent improvements, with some seeing CSAT scores rise up to 98 percent

— Agent productivity holding steady during peak season, even with surging demand

Beyond those internal metrics, customer satisfaction tells its own story. The company’s Net Promoter Scores (NPS) showed a marked increase among users who interacted with customer support, compared to those who didn’t.

Empowering agents to enhance customer experiences

For Grossenbacher, one of the most exciting shifts has been the evolving role of support agents.

“At first, I was worried how my team would adapt to AI. But we focused on change management. We showed them how AI helps them, not replaces them,” he explains. “Today, agents are not just responders–they’re controllers. They oversee what AI does and jump in with empathy when needed.”

With a multilingual customer base—serving German, French, Italian, and English—language complexity is a given. While Swiss Casinos ensures agents are multilingual, Zendesk’s translation tools make it easier to respond consistently and quickly across languages.

Looking ahead to agentic AI

Swiss Casinos is just scratching the surface with AI for customer service. The company is now testing Zendesk’s latest agentic AI features to accelerate automation even further.

“We’re looking at agentic AI agents, and it’s crazy how fast we can now deploy use cases,” offers Grossenbacher. “What used to take our developers an hour—like automating a simple FAQ—now takes five minutes. That’s a huge time saver.”

The CX team at Swiss Casinos definitely plans to continue betting on the transformational benefits of AI.

“AI won’t replace the human part of support, but it will let us maintain quality and speed as we grow,” concludes Grossenbacher. “AI lets us scale without losing the human touch.”