Trodo drives the future of automated CX with Zendesk AI

Finding the right replacement part for your car can be overwhelming. Trodo, a fast-growing European vehicle parts marketplace, has more than four million products in its inventory. With such a massive selection of car parts and accessories, making it quick and easy for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for is essential.

“Our mission globally is to remove the obstacles to movement for customers and ensure the freedom of mobility,” says Laurent Dathie, Head of Customer Experience for Trodo and its sister brand, Eurodel. “The idea for us is being the assistant to daily mobility, making sure that a family is able to go on vacation at the time they planned it, and that the parts arrive on time, effortlessly.”

Since its founding in Norway in 2013, Trodo’s footprint has expanded to thousands of daily customers across 150-plus countries and supporting over 16 languages. Proving that delivering a flawless customer experience is paramount. Yet, when managing an operation that faces massive peak volumes, balancing swift transactional speed with high-tier expertise presents a significant challenge.

Shifting from manual templates to smart automation

As ticket volumes climbed during peak periods to between 40,000 and 50,000 requests per month—totaling roughly half a million tickets annually—Trodo’s support operation required a strategic paradigm shift. Historically, Trodo had successfully implemented smart routing to bring painful 49-hour reply times down to a sleek 4.2-hour median baseline. However, sustaining that speed manually was becoming impossible as volume swelled.

An internal audit revealed that the team was spending vast quantities of human time managing simple, repetitive requests.

“We saw a very high number, over 80 percent of cases, that were resolved in one touch by our staff,” Laurent explains. “If you already have the context, the business use case clear, and the material to respond to in text, and at the end of the day you’re only using a human to trigger it—it doesn’t make sense to continue that way.”

Recognizing that the standard transactional loops were slowing human productivity, Trodo turned to deeper Zendesk automation capabilities. For Trodo, it was a clear focus, using technology to target simple journeys directly, bypassing conversational “fluff” to provide instant answers to urgent tracking or shipping queries.

“For us, AI means more automation than a sort of conversational LLM to talk and chat about the weather,” Laurent notes. “Being able to provide quick and straightforward targeted responses is a great way to take care of those direct, simple, Tier-1 responses.”

Building “AI Readiness” with redk

Sustaining a swift response operation while handling a massive international scale demanded a complete transformation of Trodo’s internal data architecture. To build this foundation, Trodo partnered with the Zendesk specialists at redk to design an operating model that was structurally prepared for AI deployment.

“We’ve been doing this together for the last year,” Laurent explains. “A lot of software vendors tell you, ‘Oh yeah, you can do this in weeks,’ right? But you’ve been able to deliver quite a big impact to the business, understanding the complexity itself.”

Working alongside redk, Trodo focused heavily on knowledge management foundations, ensuring that the guardrails, policies, and macro workflows given to the AI were flawlessly structured before launch. By auditing their workflow framework and standardizing transactional responses, redk helped Trodo map clear, straightforward customer journeys, enabling them to turn raw data into a reliable, automated front line.

This collaborative framework allowed Trodo to successfully implement advanced routing and automated self-service, ensuring that the transition into automation was handled with absolute operational precision.

Driving high efficiency and significant resource savings

The impact of shifting these transactional workloads to automation was immediate and measurable. Out of the thousands of requests landing in their queues monthly, Trodo achieved an automated resolution rate of up to 40 percent. This means roughly 16,000 inquiries per peak month are effortlessly solved by the AI or through client self-service workflows.

“It frees up a lot of resources,” says Laurent. “And it gives our human agents the time to handle more complex cases.”

Critically, automating these lower-tier tickets hasn’t compromised support quality; it has elevated it. By establishing robust guardrails and workflow parameters, Trodo ensures that customers seeking quick answers receive them with absolute precision.

“The good thing about AI is that you give it the policies and the guidelines and the guardrails that it needs to follow, and it will follow them,” notes Laurent.

Elevating the human touch through field expertise

By offloading transactional overhead to Zendesk, Trodo has been able to reinvest its resources into what needs human attention, complex problem-solving. This shift has completely reshaped the company’s internal approach to hiring and training. Instead of employing data-entry tier support staff, Trodo is cultivating an advanced core team of specialized experts.

“Everything that requires a human touch, in our case, it’s mostly mechanical knowledge—experts in the field,” Laurent emphasizes. “We’re building a group of experts that will attend to the difficult cases only, and all the rest will be handled automatically.”

This approach also ensures that Trodo retains a perfect balance for users who are skeptical of automated tools, keeping the door fully open for high-touch human communication. To Laurent, maintaining this flexibility is simply standard practice for an organization that puts customer care at the center of every department—including logistics.

“You have to always have the balance between working on the return on investment… and having a classy way that you’re balancing and opening the doors to someone who wants to talk to a human directly,” Laurent says, recalling a humorous customer prompt requesting “someone who breathes.”

With Zendesk powering its automated front line, Trodo remains uniquely positioned to scale globally while staying grounded in true mechanical expertise and customer-centric care. “At the end of the day, there is no department that doesn’t understand that the customer comes first.”