German Tennis Federation's AI chatbot Smashy backs up its service team 24/7
24/7Live on tennis.de since February 2026, answering general questions around the clock. According to Helm & Walter, recurring questions are answered in chat regardless of opening hours, which relieves traditional support channels, and anonymised usage shows which topics people ask about most. No outcome figures (questions handled, resolution rate, time saved) have been published.
“With up to 300,000 monthly users and 250 million website visits per year, the platform is the central digital hub for German tennis. Traditional service channels quickly reach their limits with approximately 20,000 service requests annually resulting from these high user numbers.”
- Who
- Deutscher Tennis Bund (DTB), the German Tennis Federation, which runs tennis.de. The project is led on the DTB side by Daniel Jacob, Head of Digitalization & Innovation. The chatbot was built by Helm & Walter IT-Solutions (Dresden) for the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB), in a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI).
- Problem
- tennis.de serves players of every level, coaches, club officials, parents and fans, with hundreds of pages on rankings, licences, subscriptions, training and rules. According to Helm & Walter, about 20,000 service requests a year meant traditional service channels quickly reached their limits, and finding an answer meant clicking through complex site structures.
- Agent
- A chat window on tennis.de. Smashy uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): it searches tennis.de pages, FAQs, PDFs and documents, writes a short answer from the relevant passages, cites its sources and suggests follow-up questions. It is multilingual and accessible. It does not handle regional association information or search for specific tournaments, and the DTB asks users to check answers and sources before important decisions.
We'll build it for you
Book a callView the prompt
Try it yourself with RAG chatbot on tennis.de (Helm & Walter IT-Solutions)
You help a tennis federation, league or large club. Goal: a website chatbot that answers players' and coaches' general questions only from our own pages, cites the page it used, and sends everything else to our service team, checked by me before launch. My input: [our key pages: rankings, licences, membership, coach education, competitions], [the 30 questions our service team gets most], [what the bot must not answer, e.g. regional or tournament-specific questions], [who handles what, with contact]. Give me: 1) a clean, source-tagged knowledge base; 2) a short answer with its source page for each frequent question; 3) a hand-off message per topic; 4) a clear 'what I can and can't do' intro; 5) 15 test questions with expected answers to approve.What we can do for your club or brand
Federations, leagues and big clubs field the same questions all season: how rankings work, how to get a licence, which coaching course to take. The Court can set up a website or WhatsApp assistant built only on your own pages, that cites its sources, says clearly what it can't answer and hands those questions to a named person on your service team, so your staff spend their time on the cases that need a human.
Source:
German Tennis Federation (DTB) on tennis.de, Feb 2026; Helm & Walter IT-Solutions project page, Feb 2026 · first-party source
What they did
The DTB worked with Helm & Walter from August 2025 to the February 2026 go-live, with a two-person team and a four-figure budget. Smashy reuses the assistant Helm & Walter had built for the DOSB and the North Rhine-Westphalia state sports federation on vibss.de; the DTB was the first federation to take it up. Most of the work went into preparing tennis.de content (hundreds of subpages, FAQs, ranking and licence rules) so it could be searched, and into telling users clearly what the chatbot can and cannot do. The DTB announced Smashy on tennis.de and LinkedIn.
How it went
Daniel Jacob, Head of Digitalization & Innovation at the DTB, quoted on the builder's page: "The collaboration with Helm & Walter was exceptionally smooth and solution-oriented at all times. [...] We would like to thank you for the implementation so far and look forward to the next steps in connecting our regional associations to the chatbot." The next step is to connect the regional associations, each with its own knowledge base on the same system. Limits: the volume figures describe tennis.de's traffic and service load before launch, not results. No figures on questions handled, answer accuracy or workload relief have been published.