Billink meets and exceeds customer response time expectations with Trengo

Billink is a buy now pay later company. That facilitates payment services for online shops.

Since 2009 the team of Billink works on creating the most flexible and complete payment method. With success, the company was voted, in both 2021 and 2022, the best alternative payment method in the Netherlands. By 2023, the platform is used by over 2 million Dutch and Belgian customers, and deployed by 3,000 sales partners.

Challenge: Meeting response time expectations and high-quality customer contact

As a buy now pay later company, customer trust is extremely important for Billink, according to Operations Manager Bart den Outer. Therefore, the team works hard to increase trust and improve the customer experience centrally.

"Billink is a growth company and in the process of growth, we want to keep making efficiency gains. But never at the expense of the customer experience."

With a focus on customer excellency, and dealing with often urgent matters regarding payments the Billink team aims for their communication to be easy and on point.

"We want to ensure customers can easily reach our teams and receive adequate answers fast. Our tooling should support this, and make quality customer contact possible and while equally making work easy for our teams. We want to have a clear overview, to see what comes in when so we can act on that appropriately."

"This is why we were looking for tooling that ensures that our channels come together, where teams can work together efficiently and in which several departments can also communicate internally."

Solution: Increasing efficiency working from a team inbox and by setting up automated workflows

On the hunt for a platform that complemented Billink’s goals, they quickly found Trengo.

"We started looking for the right customer engagement platform for us, one that would help us work more efficiently," Bart notes.

"Where previously there was a lot of emailing back and forth, different departments now work within the Trengo team inbox. When there are questions, the team uses private notes (internal notes) and gets to the solution of a ticket quickly.”

"Employees tag colleagues or leave notes, so they collaborate within the customer conversation and get to the solution faster. For example, a Finance colleague easily collaborates with customer care via @tagging. There are no more endless email threads and questions are resolved easily. Plus, the solution is communicated to customers way faster than before."

And by ‘fast’ the Billink team have a high bar set and aims always to meet (and exceed) customer expectations.

"We have SLA agreements with customers on contact channels. This means for WhatsApp that customers always have an initial response within five minutes. Our customers experience this as very pleasant. One of the main pillars of our service is customer experience and customer satisfaction for nothing. Trengo greatly helps us deliver on that promise."

From Freshdesk to Trengo

"Previously, we had an integration with Freshdesk but wanted to switch. Trengo stood out because they focus fully on automation, offer Dutch customer support and ensure that all channels come into the same tooling. That makes it a very manageable system, for me but also the employees who get to work with it."

Switching from Freshdesk to Trengo Billink wanted to ensure smooth onboarding.

"As recognisable, change is sometimes scary. But we noticed with the Trengo onboarding and introduction of our teams, everyone was up and running within three days."

"Trengo is a simple, clean and easy-to-understand system. The onboarding went without a hitch."

The better the automation, the higher the customer satisfaction

We asked Senior Customer Service Representative Eva Smit more about the automation of workflows.

"To ensure customer satisfaction, we have activated flowbots on our channels, including WhatsApp, within Trengo. This way, customers are served more efficiently and better."

So how does this work? And how does it help the teams?

"Through the Flowbot, we quickly find out the customer's question. The bot automatically asks questions, customers answer them and we thus request the correct data. This allows us to help customers immediately."

"About 200 chats come in every week, and all these calls have already gone through the flowbot. All our customers have a talk with the flowbot first, and only land in our inbox when they haven’t received the right answer yet."

Their team is supported by this. As the flowbot picks up a lot of FAQs, that they otherwise would have had to spend time on (and money).

"The calls that come into the inbox are so clearly indicated that the customer service agent picks them up right away. And as a result, we respond to a WhatsApp message within 5 minutes and a Live Chat within 3 minutes."

"I can recommend a flowbot to anyone, it provides more insight into customer demand and therefore better support. Also, you increase efficiency, and leave customers with high satisfaction."

Spend less time and effort on FAQs

"We found out that certain questions were asked more often, for example, the question of whether an invoice can be paused. That’s why we set up the flowbot, to solve FAQs by itself and direct customers to the correct information in the Billink app. No employee needs to be involved in this, the chat is resolved without assistance."

"Of course, there are also questions that require customer service agents, the chat is then assigned to the right team. And because we have requested the data before, we help customers faster and meet our SLA."

How Trengo pays off for Billink:

• Smooth internal communication: colleagues can leave notes internally within customer conversations, and easily @tag other employees. By conferring fast customers are not kept waiting.
• Effortless collaboration: endless email threads are a thing of the past. Messages are not missed, as all conversations come together in one team inbox. And can be referred to the right employees or teams, from finance to customer care.
• High customer satisfaction: the customer journey at Billink is well thought out. From an automated flowbot that unburdens the team, giving customers instant answers to FAQs, to responding to larger issues within minutes. Customers’ expectations are met without having to ask too much of the customer care teams.

"Trengo and Billink stand for efficiency, solution orientation and happy users," said Eva Smit.