How Rakuten reached 89%
first-contact resolution

With more than 50,000 support tickets per month, Rakuten France's customer service faced a major scaling challenge. Response times reached 48 hours during activity peaks (sales, Black Friday), first-contact resolution was stuck at 52%, and cost per ticket remained high despite optimization efforts.

Most requests concerned repetitive topics: order tracking, return policy, refunds, payment issues. Topics that are perfectly documented, yet time-consuming to handle manually at scale.

Rakuten integrated an EzyAgents agent directly into its ticket-processing flow, connected to its CRM, its logistics ERP and its product knowledge base. The agent operates in French and Japanese, matching the markets served.

• Automatic qualification and replies for order-tracking and return requests
• Real-time access to the customer's order data to personalize every reply
• Detection of dissatisfaction signals and priority escalation to a human advisor
• HITL approval on goodwill gestures above €50 and on refunds
• Weekly analysis of contact reasons to feed process improvement

After 3 weeks of gradual rollout, the agent handled 68% of total ticket volume autonomously. First-contact resolution went from 52% to 89%. Average response time dropped from 48 hours to 4 minutes on automated requests.

Cost per contact fell by 55%, generating significant annual savings. Customer NPS rose 37 points in six months — the fastest improvement ever recorded in the history of Rakuten France's CX program.