Albert Heijn Reduces Customer Service Contacts by 50% with Rasa AI Agent

Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands and a subsidiary of Ahold Delhaize, uses a Rasa-powered AI agent to handle customer service, according to a Rasa customer story. The retailer needed a digital agent that could handle complex requests in Dutch, operate securely at scale and integrate with existing systems without giving up control over data or operations. Albert Heijn began working with Rasa in 2019 with 20 to 25 structured conversation flows for the most common questions, later expanded the agent to WhatsApp for 24/7 support, and migrated to Rasa CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models) in 2024 for more complex multi-turn conversations. "We needed a solution that could run on-premises, support Dutch language complexity, and scale with our ambitions," said Stijn Verhoeven, Product Owner Self-Service and Generative AI. The CALM-based agent runs on-premises across web and mobile, supports authenticated, personalised experiences and lets customers type freely instead of clicking buttons. It maintains about 30 deterministic flows for common questions and actions, and handles long-tail questions with a retrieval-augmented generation setup that grounds large-language-model answers in the FAQ content on Albert Heijn's website and app. The agent achieves a 50% prevented contact rate, resolving issues without human escalation, and a 42% quality score across the Netherlands and Belgium, and customer satisfaction rose 0.5 points on a 5-point scale after the move to CALM. High-volume uses include subscription cancellations and order changes before cutoff times. For digital stamp campaigns, the agent checks eligibility and adds missing stamps to customers' accounts automatically, cutting contacts for that request by 80%. New user stories now take 2 to 3 story points instead of 5. Albert Heijn plans voice support, more languages and flows for business customers, while Ahold Delhaize is consolidating six assistants in the U.S. into one Rasa-based agent.