Using rich messaging to increase customer engagement from 2% to 40% for heating solutions provider Vaillant
About Vaillant
The Vaillant Group is an international family-owned company with a heritage of more than 141 years in providing customers with energy-saving and easy to operate solutions for heating, cooling and hot water.
In its core business of heating technologies the company is the second-largest European manufacturer in this sector. In addition, the Vaillant Group is also active in ventilation and air-conditioning technology markets.
What challenges did Vaillant face?
Vaillant Service UK has a growing customer base in which manual communication methods, such as printed letters and outbound phone calls, are no longer the quickest or most effective at getting a customer to engage with the organisation.
The return rate on postage has always been low and the outbound call platform is not always customer-friendly, as the call could not connect with the customer at a time that is convenient to them.
Vaillant needed to start investigating different communication mediums in order to more successfully engage and interact with their customer base.
What were Vaillant looking for from a solution?
- A platform which allowed customers to trigger a direct message to them, navigate to their website, or initiate a call with a live agent – all from within the same message
- The solution had to be fully controlled in-house and not be maintained by a supplier
- Any solution should also be easy to use (for customers and in-house agents) while maintaining an advanced level of functionality
- Should allow messages to be sent en masse, with the ability to personalise each message for each unique customer
- The solution had to target customer’s mobile devices.
“The Esendex range of products greatly enhance the way we speak with our customers from sales follow-ups and engineer appointment confirmations, all the way through to general Q&As.”
ARRON ALDERSON, SOLUTIONS AND PROCESS MANAGER, VAILLANT
How was this achieved?
After gaining an in-depth understanding of Vaillant’s requirements, Esendex designed a solution around our RCS and SMS Landing Page solutions. The way the process works is simple.
Within Esendex’s self-serve, multi-channel, rich messaging platform (Messaging Studio) Vaillant were able to quickly and easily build their own rich message, which would follow up on boiler quotations that had been previously supplied to customers.
If the customer had a non-RCS compliant device (I.e. Apple handset) then Messaging Studio would automatically detect this, and send an SMS Landing Page. If they did have an RCS compliant device (I.e. an Android handset) then they would receive an RCS message.
As well as striking imagery and personalised text sections, each message had 3 calls to action. These being:
- Start text chat. When selected, this option would allow the customer to start a two-way text chat from their native messaging application. At the Vaillant end, the conversation would be managed from within the Messaging Studio two-way chat environment.
- Call us. By selecting this option a call would automatically be initiated with a Vaillant sales representative.
- Email us. Selecting this option would automatically open a new email with the address and subject line automatically populated.
What are the benefits of rich messaging to Vaillant?
- The response rate from customers approached via rich, mobile-focused messaging is now 40%, compared with figures of between 2% and 5% when using previous channels like post and agent-based calls
- RCS/SMS Landing Pages can be sent to customers from a single environment/message template
- Traditional communications like post and agent-based outbound sales calls have now been replaced by rich, mobile-focused communications
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