Mewa Textil-Service has revolutionized its service and support processes with a tailored AI solution

Mewa Textil-Service is a leading provider of reusable textile rental solutions such as workwear, cleaning cloths, and oil absorption mats. The company also leads the way in sustainability, through eco-friendly laundering, water recycling, and energy-efficient operations. 

Mewa has more than 200,000 customers in 15 European countries. Those customers represent a wide variety of industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, food service, construction, and automotive garages and dealerships. 

Currently, there are more than 10 million Mewa clothing items in circulation. Every day, Mewa employees wash more than 300 tons of laundry. Every year, the company processes an average of around 800,000 customer orders and service requests — impressive numbers. But until recently, the processing, which involved manually handling emails and phone calls, proved to be less impressive to Mewa customers and employees.

Delivering the experience customers expect

“Customers who are used to seamless e-commerce experiences such as automated ticket handling and self-service portals found our manual service and support model outdated and inefficient,” says Thomas Langner, Head of Digital Marketing at Mewa. 

Internally, the company’s service and support team was having difficulty processing requests and inquiries in a timely manner. The reasons? The company’s manual processes and legacy customer relationship management (CRM) systems were not designed to handle the volume of work. In addition, fewer skilled workers have been entering the local labor pools, particularly in the service and support areas, and many experienced workers are retiring, creating a labor shortage. 

The remaining team members found themselves handling more work, with an increasing volume of orders and requests, using manual processes and disparate systems. A large portion of that work involved routine, administrative tasks.

It all added up to a slower response, less time working with customers, and a greater chance of errors, affecting customer and employee satisfaction.  

Fashioning better customer service and support  

To move up to “impressive” in services and support, Mewa developed, in partnership with SAP and its customer experience (CX) consulting and implementation partner SYBIT, a solution that automates the company’s related processes. The solution is designed with SAP CX solutions: SAP Commerce, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Service Cloud, as well as SAP ERP. All three SAP CX solutions were deployed across Mewa’s European locations, enabling seamless integration, faster ticket processing, and optimized workflows in each of the company’s facilities.

“We have revolutionized our processes by automating more than 60% of customer requests,” says Langner. In addition, 90% of all inquiries are now digitized. Customers and potential customers submit inquiries and requests through a self-service portal instead of sending emails or calling. In one example of a portal use, customers have stated it’s significantly easier to communicate workwear modifications through the portal than through other channels.

“The portal is customer service deluxe,” says Ruth Staudenmayer, Managing Director of Gefluegelhof Schoenecke, Founding Member of the Mewa Customer Advisory Board. 

Boosting response and savings

The solution’s rule-based automation has reduced manual intervention, which benefits customers, employees, and Mewa. Both ticket and inquiry processing are faster with less chance of errors. And workflows are optimized.  

With enhanced efficiency comes cost and time savings. By significantly reducing processing time per ticket, Mewa has lowered operational costs. The employee workload has also been reduced, especially when it comes to routine administrative tasks, now handled by AI. In fact, this year (2025) AI will probably save about 65,000 employee hours. 

Achieving 360° monitoring with self-service capability

Customers and employees also benefit from a new level of transparency. In the past, customer data was stored in different systems, preventing a unified view of customer interactions. The SAP solution has replaced the outdated systems, consolidating data to provide a seamless 360° self-service view, which fosters collaboration. The service and support teams and customers can quickly and easily monitor data, invoices, contracts, and products in real time and provide feedback regarding requests. 

As mentioned before, the shift to digital self-service has streamlined interactions, reducing reliance on traditional service channels and support. In line with the “Keep the Core Clean” principle, extensions are employed using SAP BTP, for flexibility and system integrity.

Making workwear order processing work even better

The implementation of SAP CX solutions along with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP CX AI Toolkit is expected to allow Mewa to accelerate the development of custom artificial intelligence (AI) automation use cases tailored to address specific operational and strategic needs. 

For example, Mewa plans to enhance the customer experience by using AI text optimization and churn analysis to streamline processes. AI will also be used to detect irrelevant comments that prevent or slow down automatic processing. These and other innovations will help deliver a more seamless, accelerated request and inquiry interaction.

The perfect fit to be honored

Those innovations and benefits have made a great impression on employees, customers, and the industry, as demonstrated by Mewa’s recent honor. At the SAP Innovation Awards 2025, Mewa was the winner in the Customer Experience category. The award is given to an organization that achieves business transformation by using SAP cloud solutions to create, develop, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Check out Mewa’s pitch deck for more information.