DRV Accountants & Adviseurs is a Dutch business with accountants, tax specialists, and advisers that focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). By supporting ‘companies that form the backbone of our economy’, they make a promise to their customers to excel in client satisfaction and quality for entrepreneurs in SMEs. DRV understands that, in order to keep this promise, they must be easily and readily accessible to their clients. They recognized that a modern company only being reachable by telephone and by email is somewhat outdated, so DRV went looking for a robust, omni-channel solution.
Omni-channel solution search
Until last year, customer contact at DRV was still done in the traditional way by phone or email. There were stories circulating internally about work pressure from the service desk due to the inefficiencies and the time it takes to handle traditional phone calls. Streamlining service desk touchpoints not only benefits the workforce internally, but also provides more opportunities to excel in customer satisfaction. This was the primary reason why Alain van Houten (online marketer at DRV) and Roy van Keulen (ICT service coordinator) went searching for an omni-channel solution that would benefit the entire organization.
Webchat was already used in the recruitment department for contact with candidates at DRV, but this was a separate, proprietary solution. Their wish was to incorporate Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp for Business into their business processes, but they recognized that simply turning on these disparate communication channels would result in silo IT (data segregation) and that was not an ideal solution.
Ready for the next step
Roy: “We had just completed a migration to Microsoft 365 and we were still busy with the adoption.” Alain: “We followed a podcast in which Microsoft discussed the news about Microsoft Teams (the Teams Talk Podcast ed.) and learned about the ROGER365.io solution completely by accident! This started the ball rolling because we recognized that this would be a nice addition to our current system."
Expanding possibilities
A solution designed for seamless integration with Teams was ideal for DRV. This would allow the entire organization to immediately benefit from the additional communication channels. The DRV migration to Microsoft 365 had just been completed, so the ROGER365.io solution was all that was needed to add omni-channel touchpoints to a messaging environment that was already familiar to the DRV employees.
DRV has been using ROGER365.io for about 9 months now. ROGER365.io incorporated the additional communication channels, CRM integration, and a reporting tool as standard. Two WhatsApp channels have been connected for the service desk and recruitment department. There are also two webchat channels, Facebook Messenger channels, and a Twitter account.
Alain explains: “We are currently still using the solution for only two departments but we may decide to add more colleagues in the short term. There is also a need for a solution like this for lead generation and cross-selling. If a (potential) client is struggling with an issue or needs one of our solutions currently, contact can only be made via a contact form on our website. The possibility of low threshold contact via WhatsApp, for example, could be an ideal solution. We have received questions via WhatsApp in the past where a response required assistance from a specialist. This involved multiple channels of asynchronous communication and was very inefficient. It would be useful if certain advisers had access to such a channel in order to answer those questions directly.”
Multiple channels
The WhatsApp channel for Recruitment has been linked for 6 months and WhatsApp for the Service Desk followed shortly thereafter. As a bonus, both webchats start with a request form for contact details and a description of the issue. This allows our colleagues to immediately see who they are dealing with and what the contact is about, potentially allowing the conversation to be routed to a subject matter expert within the department. If an immediate response is impractical due to workload, responding at a later time is also possible.
“We quickly learned to leverage the benefits of the new system." says Roy. He continues: ''There are fewer calls and emails so action can be taken faster. It took some getting used to in the beginning, but I believe we have now fairly succeeded in getting it working properly.”
Next steps with ROGER365.io
There are plenty of follow-up steps that can be taken to tailor the solution to your specific requirements or changing business processes. ‘’Chats work very fast. While you always get a response by telephone, you sometimes miss some responses with this form of communication. Not only can people click away without saying anything, but customer satisfaction is also more difficult to gauge. The integration of a satisfaction measurement is something we plan to look into for the future" says Alain.
Roy: ''We use TOPdesk internally which is something ROGER365.io also supports. That is just a little too early for us now, but the integration with our ticketing system is very interesting. This saves the additional steps of opening a different system and duplicating data.” Alain adds: “We don't have a real CRM system yet, but this would also be a great step forward for us. We could log contact moments and optimize our communication even further. And I would actually like to take a look at sending campaigns via WhatsApp!”
