When your customer base is constantly on the move, how do you make sure you stay connected? Colin Peters, Communications Director for Europe at Radius Payment Solutions has all the answers.
More About WhatsApp"We're just trying to be there when the customer needs us, on their terms.”
Radius Payment Solutions was founded 31 years ago, predominantly as a fuel card provider, working with SMEs to companies with large fleets of vehicles. With a rapidly-growing customer base, Radius needed to find more efficient ways to keep in touch with its increasingly mobile customers, so it chose two-way SMS and WhatsApp to keep its customer service on the right track.
“CM.com understood our issue, understood that we already had a CRM in place and that we needed a bolt-on, and were prepared to look at our bespoke requirements and work with us to deliver them. That was unique.”
“We branched out into vehicle telematics about six years ago, which is obviously a complementary product to fuel and, in the last two years, we've branched out into telecoms and Insurance products. We've got about 1,500 people in the business and we’ve doubled in size in the last five years.
“Our target market is a mobile workforce, from the vehicle to the tracking, to the mobile device, to the office. Fuel is a big cost to businesses, so we started seeing how we could help our customers become more efficient in terms of tracking driver behavior and optimizing their route. In addition to that, in ten or fifteen years' time, we probably won't see the diesel usage we see today, so we're diversifying into electric vehicle charging points as well.”
“We started working with CM.com around six months ago when we realized we needed to integrate multi-messaging.
“Multi-messaging includes, Email, SMS, WhatsApp, and other channels within that arena and we've also got our own bespoke CRM system that was built internally.”
Colin continues, “With over 250,000 businesses across the world, we decided we needed a solution that could take those different incoming and outgoing channels and deliver an integrated approach. That’s when we started talking to CM.com."
"The main services we use are WhatsApp for Business and 2-way SMS. I firmly believe that WhatsApp is only going to grow, so the main objective was to try to launch a WhatsApp channel that worked in conjunction with our internal systems. CM.com gave us the technology and an agent platform to help respond to those people.
“We surveyed our customers in three countries and WhatsApp was by far their preferred channel.
“At the same time, we realized it's not necessarily our preferred channel as a business, because that's not how we operate or have operated, but we've seen a definite impact from the positive conversations and the ease of managing a WhatsApp chat. Because you have the whole conversation history there in front of you, the agents can very quickly understand exactly what's going on with that customer.
“It's still early days, but we can already see the impact it’s having since we launched in Germany, Italy, and Portugal and we’re receiving a couple of thousand WhatsApp messages a week now. In Germany, in the first couple of weeks at least 15-20% of the WhatsApp messages are people saying, “I'm so glad you've got WhatsApp now.”
“It's quicker, more convenient, and better for the customer. Our customers aren’t sitting at a PC all day, so we knew they needed something mobile and that's why we launched WhatsApp."
Radius’s WhatsApp channel has resulted in markedly more opportunities to engage with its customers and it’s meant that basic tasks can be dealt with more quickly and efficiently.
“Our customers know that if they have an issue – if they want to look at an invoice or order a fuel card – we’re right there for them and we can assist them better.
“They aren’t numbers. We don't look at our customers as a share of wallet, we purely gauge success by the amount and quality of the interactions we have with that customer. We don’t want them sitting there on hold or waiting for an email response, so we’ve made sure they can have a conversation with a real person really quickly and conveniently to try to resolve any queries.
“We say 20% of customer inquiries take up 80% of our time, so one part of WhatsApp is cost reduction so we can get our front line staff to be more productive and have meaningful conversations. It's about trying to spend more time with customers from an education perspective and being there when the customer needs us, on their terms.
“It's really been an eye-opener to evaluate why customers are contacting us and what they're speaking about because it's all documented."
After the success of WhatsApp, Colin’s still not satisfied, so he’s planning to introduce more innovative tech to reinvent Radius’s customer service offering.
“Next, we’re introducing a CM.com Chatbot, so we're going to try out-of-hours service to help customers 24/7 with those most common requests.
“We don't want to make it a robotic experience – we pride ourselves on the fact that we're not a call center – but if somebody needs an answer – a small business owner doing their clerical work after hours, for example – we can get back to them right when they need us and, if we can't give them the information they need right then, we'll tell them we'll get back to them the next working day with the information they need.
“As long as that person realizes that behind the Chatbot there’s a person as well. We're at this crossroads where the more questions we ask, the better we get to know what our customers’ needs are, but the more they click through a Chatbot, the less human the interaction is. So, I think it's very interesting to try to integrate technology and self-help, versus the human touch we’re so proud of.
“This is potentially the biggest change we've made to our customer contact strategy in the last 10 years. We're putting the customer first and thinking, what does the customer want? They want something easily accessible, they want a quick reply and they want us to resolve their issues as fast as possible. It's that simple."
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