Asaas transforms complexity into confidence with Zendesk Copilot

This story was written and produced by one of Zendesk’s regional teams and translated from the original.

A culture built around the customer

Every entrepreneur knows that time is a valuable resource. That belief led to the founding of Asaas in 2010, with a mission to simplify financial management for Brazilian businesses. Instead of requiring customers to adapt to the traditional schedules and processes of the financial system, the company created a platform that makes payments, collections, invoice issuance and financial management accessible whenever customers need them.

Today, Asaas serves more than 300,000 active customers and has established itself as one of Brazil’s leading financial and operational platforms. Its customer experience operation provides omnichannel support through chat, WhatsApp, email, phone, social media and IVR. Behind this structure is a multilevel support model backed by a dedicated Enablement team responsible for operational governance, platform management, quality, Workforce Management and Voice of the Customer initiatives.

For Manoela Gieseler, COO of Asaas, the customer experience has always been closely tied to the company’s own journey. Having started her career in customer support before moving into executive leadership, she has closely observed the evolution of customer expectations and the operation itself.

“Our purpose was never simply to change systems,” Manoela says. “It was to protect and strengthen the value of our brand.”

This vision also guided the evolution of the internal operation. Instead of treating customer support as an isolated function, Asaas created an Enablement organization to distribute knowledge, governance and operational intelligence throughout the company. Known internally as CX Presence, this model ensures that the customer experience is considered from product conception through launch, operation and continuous improvement.

Preparing the operation to scale

Rapid growth brought new challenges. As the customer base expanded and new products launched, the support platform developed internally by Asaas required increasing maintenance efforts. Although it met the company’s needs during its early years, further development began competing directly with investments in the financial platform—the company’s core business.

At the same time, operational complexity continued to grow. Customer information was spread across different tools, technical knowledge remained concentrated among a small number of specialists and the operation lacked an intelligence layer capable of supporting automation and decision-making at scale. In many cases, each interaction required internal consultations before an agent could confidently respond to the customer.

Henrique Avelar, Head of Customer Experience at Asaas, summarizes the situation as three major challenges: fragmented information, decentralized knowledge and the absence of an intelligent layer to support automation and operational governance. The company realized that simply expanding its existing environment would not be enough to support its planned growth over the coming years.

As a result, leadership approached the migration as a strategic business decision—not simply a technology change. As Manoela Gieseler explains, every interaction represents a moment of trust in the brand. Investing in a platform capable of protecting that trust became essential to supporting Asaas’ sustainable growth.

Turning knowledge into scale

Building a customer experience operation prepared for growth required more than replacing technology. Asaas was looking for a platform that could unify customer interactions, centralize operational knowledge and provide the flexibility needed to support its growth. After evaluating different providers, the company chose Zendesk because it saw alignment between the platform, its long-term strategic vision and its customer-centric culture.

Implementation began in 2024 with the adoption of Zendesk Suite and the restructuring of queues, channels and operational workflows. In July 2025, the migration was completed, bringing all customer conversations from every channel into a single environment. Instead of limiting the platform to the customer support team, Asaas also introduced Employee Service to other teams across the company, enabling different departments to collaborate using the same information history.

This unified approach transformed how cases moved through the organization. Customer Support, Finance, Financial Crime Prevention, Technology, Legal and the Ombuds Office began working from the same customer timeline, eliminating the need to consult multiple tools or manually transfer information between departments. According to Manoela Gieseler, this reduced friction, strengthened governance and made complex cases faster and more efficient to resolve.

The next step was to structure the company’s knowledge. Asaas implemented Zendesk Copilot with a clear goal: to make specialist knowledge accessible to every agent during the customer interaction. To achieve this, the company reorganized its knowledge base so it could be interpreted more accurately by AI and developed two custom applications that provide technical information and suggested responses directly in the agent workspace.

“We treat Copilot as knowledge infrastructure, not as an assistant,” says Henrique Avelar. “The secret wasn’t the technology. It was preparing the knowledge so AI could understand it.”

To accelerate the solution’s evolution, the CX team also created a gamified process for evaluating Copilot’s suggested responses. Agents began rating each suggestion during customer interactions, enabling the team to continuously improve response quality, reduce hallucinations and enrich the knowledge base used by AI. This same governance model became part of the Enablement structure, ensuring that knowledge was treated as a strategic operational asset—not simply as documentation.

Resilience put to the test

A few months after completing the migration, Asaas faced the biggest operational challenge in its history. Brazil’s tax reform brought simultaneous changes across hundreds of municipalities, affecting the issuance of electronic tax invoices and creating significant uncertainty for businesses throughout the country. Because tax invoice issuance is one of the platform’s primary services, demand for support increased sharply.

During the most critical period, support volume increased 400 percent, surpassing 36,000 tickets in January 2026 alone. The Tax Invoice operation accumulated a backlog of 1,622 cases, wait times exceeded 15 hours and CSAT for the product fell to 58.8 percent. At the same time, nearly 300 internal escalations were being made each day because agents depended on a small group of specialists to answer more complex questions.

As Copilot began centralizing this technical knowledge and making it available directly during customer interactions, that dependence began to disappear. The reliability of AI-generated responses increased from 49 percent to 92 percent after the knowledge base was restructured.

In approximately two months, the Tax Invoice backlog was reduced by 93 percent, average handle time fell by 85 percent, internal escalations decreased by 85 percent and product CSAT recovered to 86.2 percent. Across the entire operation, overall customer satisfaction reached 87.5 percent—the highest level recorded in more than a year.

The migration also strengthened the company’s ability to grow. Today, Asaas serves more than 300,000 active customers and manages more than 60,000 interactions per month on a single platform. The organization now has intelligent ticket routing, automated workflows, platform governance, Workforce Management and integrated performance monitoring to support its expansion.

For Manoela Gieseler, the results go beyond operational metrics.

“When we care for the employee experience, that care naturally reaches the customer. These aren’t two different agendas. It’s the same system viewed from two sides.”

This vision enabled Asaas to overcome one of the most challenging periods in its history while building a stronger operational foundation to support its growth in the years ahead.

Looking beyond today’s customer experience

For Asaas, the work doesn’t end when a customer’s problem is resolved. The company’s long-term vision is to build a customer experience operation that can learn, adapt and continuously evolve—identifying opportunities for improvement before they reach the customer. This ambition is at the center of the CX Presence framework, which connects product development, operational data and customer support through a single strategy.

Henrique describes the next step as building a “self-correcting CX” operation. Instead of identifying problems only after a customer complains, the goal is to detect signs of deviation earlier, use AI and real-time data to support decision-making and correct potential issues before they affect the customer experience.

For Asaas, generative AI does not replace people. It strengthens teams’ ability to respond with greater confidence, allowing employees to focus their efforts on moments when human interaction creates the most value.

The company also recognizes that successful AI adoption depends on much more than technology. As customer expectations evolve, Asaas continues investing in knowledge management, governance and employee enablement to ensure that every agent has access to the right information at every stage of the customer journey.

This approach reflects the company’s belief that operational excellence begins by giving people the tools and knowledge they need to do their best work.

“Resolving is more important than responding,” says Avelar. “AI that simply speeds up a response without resolving the customer’s problem only speeds up a new contact. But AI that brings knowledge to the point of decision-making changes the game entirely.”

This same vision guides Asaas’ partnership with Zendesk. Today, the company uses Zendesk Suite, Zendesk Copilot and Employee Service as the foundation for both the customer and employee experiences. It also sees opportunities to expand this foundation as the business continues to grow.

More than a support tool, the platform has become part of the company’s long-term operational architecture.

For Manoela, this change has redefined the relationship between the two companies.

“Zendesk went from being a platform vendor to becoming an architecture partner,” she says. “Today, our conversations go beyond licenses and support. We talk about the future of our products, how we can co-create new functionality and how the intelligence we build in Customer Experience can create value for the entire company.”

As Asaas continues to grow, its purpose remains the same as it was when the company was founded in 2010: to help entrepreneurs spend less time dealing with financial complexity and more time growing their businesses.

By combining a truly customer-centric culture with a unified platform, structured knowledge and AI that empowers both employees and customers, Asaas is building an experience designed not only to scale but also to strengthen trust with every interaction.