PEOPLE OF PENNEO
Meet Esther, the person on the other end of the chat
Before she was answering questions about qualified electronic signatures and EU compliance regulations, Esther van den Haak was cleaning teeth in the Netherlands.
It’s not the most obvious career pivot. But spend five minutes talking to Esther, one of our CX Specialists, and it starts to make complete sense.
“Being a dental hygienist is actually a lot about listening,” she says. “You’re identifying a problem, explaining it clearly, and helping someone feel less anxious about something they don’t fully understand. That part didn’t change when I joined Penneo, everything else did.”
What changed was everything else.
A morning at Penneo
Esther’s day starts the same way every day: open Zendesk, check for new tickets, and scan for anything urgent. By the time most people have finished their first coffee, she’s already working through a queue that can hit ten tickets before noon: more on Mondays and Tuesdays, when the weekend’s backlog hits at once.
Most people assume the job is straightforward. Someone can’t log in, you help them log in. But the reality, Esther says, is a lot more layered than that.
“People are often surprised when I tell them what’s actually involved,” she says. “It’s not just ‘did you try turning it off and on again.’ There are certificates, regulatory requirements, different security standards depending on the country, a lot is happening behind the scenes that customers never see.”
That invisible complexity is part of what makes the support role at Penneo unusual. The product sits at the intersection of legal validity, data sovereignty, and everyday workflow. When something goes wrong, or a customer just needs to understand what they’ve signed up for, the person they reach is Esther.
The Belgian customer and the Dutch form
Ask Esther about a moment that stuck with her, and she doesn’t hesitate. A customer in Belgium was struggling. Not dramatically, no crisis, no emergency, but stuck in a way that was slowing them down and creating friction every time they used the platform. Standard troubleshooting hadn’t clicked. Something wasn’t landing.
So Esther helped them troubleshoot it. In Dutch.
“I just thought, if this is how they can get to the answer themselves, then that’s what we should do,” she says. “It wasn’t a big thing. It just made sense.”
For the customer, it was a big thing. It gave them a way to diagnose and resolve issues independently, and the feedback was immediate. What had been a recurring point of friction became something they could handle on their own.For the customer, it was a big thing. It gave them a way to diagnose and resolve issues independently, and the feedback was immediate. What had been a recurring point of friction became something they could handle on their own.
It’s a small story. But it says something important about how we see support: not as a cost centre to be minimised, but as a place where problems actually get solved.
18 min
Average first response during working hours
20–30 min
Typical full resolution for straightforward cases
Your language
Support across multiple European languages
What customers say when they get a human
One of the things Esther hears most often is surprise. Surprise that someone answered quickly. Surprise that the answer was actually helpful. And sometimes, surprise that the person on the other end of the chat spoke to them in their own language without being asked.
“Customers really appreciate it,” she says. “English is set as the default language, but if I can help someone in their own language, why wouldn’t I? A screen-sharing call in Dutch just lands differently than an email in formal English.”
Penneo’s average first response time during working hours sits at around 18 minutes, and for straightforward issues, a full resolution can come in 20 to 30 minutes. In enterprise software support, where ticket numbers and three-day turnarounds are common, that tends to come as a genuine relief.
“People are used to faceless support,” Esther says. “They expect a bot, or a form, or a response that doesn’t quite answer what they asked. When they get a real person who actually reads their message, that’s when you hear it.”
What she’d want every customer to know
Penneo is currently expanding its help centre: more articles, better videos, a smarter chatbot for questions that don’t need a human. Esther supports that. Faster resolution for simple issues means more time for the ones that actually need attention.
But she’s clear about what the chatbot is for, and what it isn’t.
“The help centre is great for getting started, finding settings, and understanding regulations. But if you’re stuck, really stuck, just reach out. We’re here. And we’ll answer in your language.”
We say trust is at the core of everything we do. Esther is part of the reason that’s actually true.
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