Indie Campers rents campervans across Europe, North America, and Oceania from around 100 depots. Its customers are rarely at a desk. They are at a depot counter at handover, or three days into a trip with a question about the vehicle, messaging from a phone in a country that is not the one they started in.
The Support Runs Alongside the Trip
A rental is not a transaction that ends at checkout. It runs for days, it moves across borders, and the questions arrive throughout: what the security deposit timeline is, which countries this vehicle is allowed to cross into, what to do about something on the van at nine at night.
The rules are not uniform either. Indie Campers’ terms exist as nine separate documents, split by region and rental type, so the correct answer to one question genuinely differs depending on where the customer picked the vehicle up and what they rented.
Most on-trip contact arrives on WhatsApp, which behaves unlike a ticket queue. Sessions expire, threads reopen, and one customer can generate a scatter of separate tickets across a single rental.
An Agent That Answers But Does Not Touch the Booking
Open runs across web chat, email, and WhatsApp, fronting Zendesk. Indie Campers made one decision early that shapes everything else: the agent is read-only against the reservation system. It cannot change a booking, swap a vehicle, or move money.
That is a security position, not a limitation they failed to fix. A customer is identified by booking code and email, and the company judged that too weak to authorise a change to a live reservation. So the agent answers, and the customer is pointed to their own authenticated client area for anything sensitive.
What it does write is on the Zendesk side. It resolves the ticket and posts the answer as a comment — around 1,600 ticket closures in a single day — collects the email, name, and booking code a human will need, appends a summary of the conversation, and sends the CSAT survey.
Booking changes and vehicle swaps are permanently human, by the customer’s policy rather than by capability. Those go to Indie Campers’ own agents in Zendesk with the details already gathered, so the handoff starts with the information rather than asking for it.
The Results
Open’s AI agent now handles a large share of Indie Campers’ support volume:
| Metric | Impact |
|---|---|
| Automation rate | 44% |
| Tickets handled | ~7,000 of 17,000 weekly |
| Channels covered | Web chat, email, and WhatsApp |
| Handoff destination | Indie Campers agents in Zendesk |
The 44% is scoped: roughly 7,000 of 17,000 tickets over a single seven-day window. It moves week to week, and it sits against a deployment that is deliberately prevented from taking the actions that would raise it. Read-only is the ceiling the company chose.
The Impact
44% automation across web chat, email, and WhatsApp lets a support team of fourteen carry seventeen thousand tickets a week without scaling headcount proportionally with the fleet. Zendesk stayed in place; nothing was migrated.
What the team keeps is the work that needs a person: the booking change, the vehicle swap, the case where the answer depends on which of nine regional agreements applies. For the customer at the depot counter, the difference is that the routine question is already answered by the time a human is needed at all.
