Serko scales global travel support with Zendesk AI

When your company books a flight for a last-minute meeting across the country, there’s a good chance Serko helped make it happen.

Serko serves a complex spectrum of users—from international travel management companies to individual travelers using Booking.com for Business. And with everything that can go wrong—and often does—with business travel, Serko needs to offer its customers an experience that’s fast, reliable, and exceptional.

“CX is the strategic backbone that connects our software to the human reality of business travel,” explains Andrew Barnard, Head of Global Client Service Delivery at Serko. “It’s about managing the entire lifecycle of trust.”

Global support across multiple time zones

Serko runs a truly global, follow-the-sun support operation to meet the high-stakes demands of corporate travel.

“We have teams based in Australia, China, and the U.S. to provide 24/7 support to our customers,” Barnard explains.

Zendesk serves as Serko’s central CX hub, delivering coverage for partners and travelers worldwide. Deep integrations with Jira, Slack, and PagerDuty ensure that customer issues flow seamlessly into engineering, incident management, and internal collaboration workflows.

“It’s far more than a ticketing system for us,” offers Matt Russell, Client Service Delivery Manager and Zendesk Systems Administrator at Serko. “Zendesk is a flexible platform that integrates deeply with our internal tooling. Combined with AI, it lets us scale globally, support multiple product lines, and maintain quality and consistency as our business grows.”

Turning CX into a strategic advantage

Serko first adopted Zendesk in 2018, but by 2021, growing scale and complexity demanded more than just a basic ticketing solution. That’s when Serko made the decision to migrate fully to Zendesk Suite Enterprise, consolidating support channels, integrations, and data into a single, global platform.

“Zendesk has evolved alongside Serko’s growth,” says Russell. “When we moved to Zendesk Suite, it stopped being just a support tool, it became the platform we use to run global customer experience.”

At the center of that experience is Zeno, Serko’s proprietary business travel booking platform. Zeno powers business travel programs for companies around the world, often operating behind the scenes under partner branding. It enforces travel policies, approvals, and spend controls—all while supporting travelers when plans change.

“For our reseller partners, Zeno is seen as being an extension of what they offer to their own customers,” explains Barnard. “And as we scaled globally, delivering consistent, high-quality support across regions, languages, and products became much more complex.”

Copilot accelerates agents and elevates consistency

Serko’s travel platform supports more than 40 languages. Before Zendesk AI, human agents supported customers across multiple regions, often translating responses manually. They used separate proprietary tools—slowing response times and introducing inconsistency.

Zendesk Copilot changed that dynamic.

“Copilot suggests responses, adjusts tone, and expands brief notes into professional responses,” Russell says. “And that’s invaluable in complex, multilingual cases.”

These tools quickly became essential, especially for U.S. teams supporting Booking.com for Business customers while coordinating with teams in China—more than a dozen time zones away.

“The summarize feature doesn’t just condense a ticket—it translates it into English,” Russell explains. “Agents can immediately understand the issue without needing to toggle between separate tools.”

When Serko launched Zendesk’s Auto Assist for its Booking.com for Business product in June 2025, the impact was immediate and measurable.

“We saw a 38 percent reduction in handling time,” Barnard says. “Agents were receiving AI-written responses based on our knowledge base and procedures, in multiple languages, ready for review.”

Beyond speed, Copilot improved agent confidence and onboarding. New hires ramped up faster with AI acting as a real-time coach, surfacing similar historical tickets and relevant help center content.

“There’s so much to learn in corporate travel software,” Russell notes. “Copilot helps new agents get productive much faster.”

AI agents handle routine work—so humans can solve real problems

Copilot improved agent efficiency, but Serko faced a larger scaling challenge in late 2024 when all Booking.com for Business support tickets were routed to Serko’s team.

“Practically overnight, there was a dramatic spike in ticket volume,” Barnard says.

To address this sudden increase, the Serko team launched Zendesk AI Agents in September 2025, initially on one product line. To get it up and running, the team defined about 20 high-confidence use cases, trained the models carefully, and added safeguards to route exceptions—things like tickets with attachments or specific risk indicators—to human agents.

The results were immediate. In just the first month, 33 percent of all resolutions were fully automated, well above Serko’s initial 25 percent target.

Additionally, AI-assisted conversations accounted for 25 to 36 percent of the ticket volume, helping support agents resolve tickets more efficiently.

“A meaningful percentage of routine tickets are now resolved without any human intervention at all,” Russell says. “And that frees our agents to focus on complex, high-value issues—system errors, availability problems, incidents—where human judgment really matters.”

And the productivity gains translated into real operational impact.

“We recently chose not to replace a support headcount due to attrition,” Barnard says. “AI made that possible without sacrificing service quality. It allowed us to manage growth more strategically.”

Even with those impressive results, Serko’s team made sure that the AI was thoroughly tested. Early deployments required human review, internal governance approvals, and strict data residency controls.

“Starting small and leaning on Zendesk’s AI specialists made all the difference,” Russell says.

Scaling forward with confidence

Today, Serko uses insights from Zendesk metrics to extensively track CX performance, from first response time and full resolution time to AI automation rates and agent productivity. While specific figures continue to evolve, Serko has already seen tangible improvements.

“Zendesk AI has allowed us to deliver faster, more consistent support at scale across multiple languages and product lines,” Russell says. “It frees our agents to focus on complex work while AI handles the routine.”

The impact of Zendesk AI goes beyond efficiency gains and automation—it reshapes how Serko approaches growth.

“Most importantly, Zendesk AI gives us confidence,” Barnard says. “Confidence that we can continue to grow, expand into new markets, and add product lines without sacrificing quality or responsiveness.”

Looking ahead, Serko plans to expand AI Agents to additional product lines and explore deeper integrations between Zendesk AI and product data to enable smarter routing, proactive issue detection, and even more autonomous resolution paths.

“In corporate travel, highly responsive customer experience is table stakes,” Barnard says. “And Zendesk—especially Zendesk AI—helps us turn that expectation into a competitive advantage.”