Calls and emails fall short in interacting with customers

With phone calls being considered as too intrusive, and emails as slow and without impact, companies struggle to interact with their customers in an efficient and effective way.

Meanwhile, many companies have failed in implementing web chat solutions, while employees use their private SMS and WhatsApp accounts to communicate with customers, resulting in commercial, privacy and security risks.

Read more about #Interact and Proximus NextGen voice.

Challenge 1: Not answering phone calls

It’s impossible to answer every phone call, but more often than not, companies frustrate their customers with endless menus and transfer loops, or not picking up the call at all… The result is missed revenue, churning customers, and damage to the company’s reputation.

Don’t let your customers wait forever, or frustrate them with endless menu options or transfer loops

NextGen Voice from Proximus can automate phone calls and autonomously answer frequently asked questions, but also perfectly handle missed calls with delivering callback requests or voicemail messages to email, or any other application, for a fraction of the cost of a missed phone call.

Challenge 2: not following-up missed calls

Even worse: many companies fail to follow up on callback requests, or voicemails left by their customers, or prospects. Employees just don’t listen to their voicemails anymore, shared mailboxes don’t offer the proper reporting, and ticketing systems often don’t deal well with audio files.

Many companies are not properly following-up missed calls

Discover how NextGen voicemail can deliver voice messages, including transcript, via mail or API to to shared mailboxes, MS Teams channels, or other applications. These can be CRM or ticketing systems, or tools like #Interact that focus on omnichannel interactions, and that are able to queue, route and report on voicemails and other interactions.

Challenge 3: Customers have also stopped answering their phone

Since ages, customers complain about companies’ reachability, but the opposite: companies complaining about customers, no longer picking up their phone, has become even more problematic. Many people, and especially the younger generation, consider phone calls being very intrusive, and expect companies to communicate when it suits them, on the channels they prefer.

Customers have stopped answering their phone

Messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp are less intrusive, less formal, more concise, and highly responsive, which makes them the ideal channels to effective and efficiently reach out to customers. Discover how

can unlock these messaging channels to all customer facing employees while keeping costs under control..

Challenge 4: Many companies have failed in implementing web chat solutions

While online chat is one of the simplest solutions, to start interacting via a text channel, many companies have failed, to sufficiently automate these conversations, and have them properly followed up by an employee, given that they usually take place, over weekends and in the evenings.

This problem can easily be solved, by continuing web conversation via SMS, or replacing web chat with WhatsApp or SMS in the first place. Discover how #Interact unlocks web chat deflection.

Challenge 5: Professional use of personal messaging channels by employees

Many employees use their personal mobile number to communicate with customers, via text message or WhatsApp, to overcome the challenges mentioned earlier. This not only poses commercial risks, but may also violate privacy, security, and other regulations.

With #Interact, any customer facing employee can use the company’s messaging channels. With it’s distributed and multilayered setup, every branch, or local point of sale can receive voice messages, or communicate via SMS or WhatsApp on a standard Belgian mobile number.

Easily solve the challenges of phone calls and text messages with #Interact and NextGen voice from Proximus