Vasa Mobility rents shared e-scooters and e-bikes in 40 cities across 12 European countries. Riders unlock a vehicle in the app, ride, and park it in a designated zone. When something goes wrong, it goes wrong in the street, often late at night, and usually in a language the rider is most comfortable in.
For most of its history, Vasa's support team could not meet riders there. This is the story of how it got there without growing the team.
The challenge
In early 2025, Vasa's support team of 64 agents worked out of Stockholm and Lisbon. They covered Swedish, English, German, and Portuguese, from 08:00 to 20:00 Central European Time. Everything else waited in a queue.
That gap mattered because of when riders actually ride. Around 38% of Vasa's trips start after 18:00, and Friday and Saturday nights are the busiest hours of the week. A rider in Milan whose scooter failed to unlock at 23:00 would get a reply the next morning, in English. By then they had usually already filed a chargeback or left a one-star review.
The contact mix was also harder than it looked:
- Ride disputes. A rider says the trip ended when they parked, but the scooter kept billing for 40 minutes.
- Parking fines. Cities fine Vasa for badly parked vehicles, and Vasa passes the fine to the rider. Each city has its own zones, fees, and appeal windows.
- Damage reports. Riders report broken brakes or a loose handlebar, often with photos, and the vehicle needs to be pulled from service fast.
- Failed unlocks. The app charges the unlock fee but the lock never opens. The rider wants their money back now.
- Account verification. Several cities require age and ID checks before a rider can use an e-scooter.
Every one of these touches personal data: location history, payment details, identity documents. As an EU company operating under GDPR, Vasa's data protection team had a firm rule. Rider data does not leave the EU.
"Our riders don't keep office hours, and they don't all speak English. We were running a 9-to-5 support desk for a business that peaks at midnight on a Saturday." — Linnea Holmberg, VP Customer Experience
Why Pazau
Vasa evaluated four AI support vendors in the spring of 2025. Two failed the data residency review in the first week, because their inference ran in US regions. A third could answer FAQs well but could not take actions. It could explain the refund policy but not issue the refund.
Pazau passed on three points that mattered to Vasa's team.
Residency by default. Vasa contracted with Pazau Ireland Limited, and its workspace runs in Pazau's EU region. Conversations, traces, and attachments are processed and stored in Dublin and Frankfurt. Pazau Guard redacts personal data before any model call, and model providers keep nothing under zero data retention. Pazau never trains foundation models on customer data, and the DPA says so in writing.
Actions, not answers. Pazau Agent could call Vasa's own ride platform directly. That meant it could look up a trip, see the telemetry, and correct the fare itself.
Procedures the CX team could own. Vasa's policies differ by city. Pazau's Procedures are written in plain language, so the operations team could encode Munich's parking rules without filing an engineering ticket.
"Our DPO read the sub-processor list before our CX team saw a demo. Pazau was the only vendor where the answer to 'where does the data go' was simply 'Dublin and Frankfurt.'" — Henrik Sjöberg, Head of Data Protection
The rollout
Vasa signed in June 2025 and went live in phases.
Weeks 1–3: Connect. Vasa's platform team exposed six internal endpoints as Pazau Actions: get_rider, get_trip, get_vehicle_telemetry, adjust_fare, issue_refund, and flag_vehicle. Pazau Inbox replaced Zendesk as the shared workspace, and the team imported three years of conversation history for simulation.
Weeks 4–6: Write the Procedures. The CX operations lead, Tomás Almeida, wrote the first nine Procedures with two senior agents. "Failed unlock → Refund" came first because it was the highest-volume contact. The Procedure checks the lock event in telemetry, confirms the fee was charged, and issues the refund with issue_refund if the lock never opened. Refunds over €25 route to a human for approval.
"Parking fine dispute" was the most complex. It pulls the fine notice, checks the vehicle's final GPS position against the city's zone map, and applies that city's appeal window. The Procedure has a separate branch for each of the 40 cities.
Weeks 7–8: Simulate. Before any rider saw it, each Procedure ran against 2,000 past conversations. Simulation found that the damage Procedure was too cautious. It escalated 30% of photo reports that agents had handled alone. Tomás tightened the wording and re-ran it the same afternoon.
August 2025: Go live. Pazau Agent started with English and Swedish chat in Stockholm. It expanded to all 40 cities and 11 languages by the end of September: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.
The results
Six months after launch, the numbers were clear.
- 73% of conversations resolved end-to-end by Pazau Agent, with no human involved. That is well above Pazau's enterprise median of 58%.
- 24/7 support in 11 languages, up from 12 hours a day in four.
- CSAT up 9 points, from 78 to 87.
- Zero added headcount. The team is the same 64 people.
- Median first response of 4 seconds, down from 3 hours 20 minutes.
The failed-unlock refund now takes under a minute. Previously a rider waited a day and often disputed the charge with their bank. Chargebacks on unlock fees fell 64% in the first quarter.
Damage reports got faster, too. When a rider uploads a photo of a broken brake, flag_vehicle pulls the scooter from service immediately and notifies the local field team. Median time from report to vehicle lockout dropped from 9 hours to 6 minutes.
The team didn't shrink. It changed. Agents who used to answer unlock refunds now handle the hard cases: injury reports, insurance claims, and appeals that need judgment. Pazau Insights scores 100% of conversations, AI and human, so quality reviews cover everything, not a 2% sample.
"The trace is what won over our field operations team. When Pazau pulls a scooter, they can see exactly why: the photo, the telemetry, and the Procedure step it followed." — Tomás Almeida, CX Operations Lead
What's next
Vasa is expanding into five new cities in 2026 and plans to launch each one in the local language from day one. With a Procedure per city, a new market is now a configuration task, not a hiring plan.
The team is also piloting Pazau Voice for its rider safety line, starting in Stockholm and Oslo. Voice will stay in the EU region, with the same redaction and trace controls as chat.
For Linnea Holmberg, the measure of success is simple. A rider with a problem at midnight in Rotterdam gets it fixed, in Dutch, in minutes.