Severs Breeman BMW & MINI

Severs Breeman is an innovative BMW & MINI dealer with five branches spread throughout the greater Rotterdam region. Personal communication, transparency and honesty are of paramount importance to the original family business. Core values that are reflected, among other things, in the car trips they organize, golf days and in providing personal service around the purchase and maintenance of a car.

Telephonic pressure

Telephone congestion is a familiar challenge for car companies, so too for Severs Breeman. “This is especially true for the workshop,” said Thomas Reijneveld, Manager IT & Quality at Severs Breeman. “Think of (un)scheduled workshop appointments, customers who want to be helped at the counter ánd a phone that is red hot. This busyness makes it difficult when customers want to reach us, and we customers by phone.”

Reijneveld illustrates the above with the following example: “The service advisor calls the customer to report the car ready. In some cases, we don’t get a hold of the customer and leave a callback request. If the customer then calls back at the time our reception or service advisor are busy by phone, it becomes another callback request. We wanted to make this process more efficient to relieve the burden not only on our team, but also on our customers. After all, we understand all too well that they too cannot be reached by phone every moment of the day.”

Call Deflection: phone to WhatsApp

Since 2019, Severs Breeman has been working with Saysimple’s messaging platform. From the start of this cooperation, Severs Breeman introduced the so-called “counter signs” – plasticized signs with QR code – to guide customers from telephony to WhatsApp. When returning the car, customers could scan the QR code and indicate that they preferred to be kept informed of the maintenance status via WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, since October 2022, the option has been added that Severs Breeman customers can also be referred to WhatsApp from the telephone queue; WhatsApp Call Deflection.

How this works. The customer calls Severs Breeman using the phone number known to them. Then the customer is presented with a selection menu of which ‘key 9 to be helped via WhatsApp’ is one of the options. The moment the customer chooses this, a transfer automatically takes place to Saysimple and a WhatsApp template message is sent to the customer’s 06 number.

Severs Breeman has started Call Deflection to WhatsApp on a small scale. Eventually, the intention is for the various teams and departments of all branches to enable Call Deflection to the phone number. A total of fifteen different flows are involved, each running on a separate phone number and triggering a unique WhatsApp message. This also includes smart routing which means that messages automatically reach the right department.

Save 700 minutes of telephony per month

Since implementing Call Deflection to WhatsApp, Severs Breeman has seen customer usage increase every week. This has already resulted in 658 minutes of telephone customer contact being saved. Severs Breeman therefore expects a lot from the service tool.

“As a service advisor you wear different hats; you help customers at the counter, speak to customers on the phone, and you manage the workshop. This can be very hectic, especially when the phone is red hot. In situations like this, it’s nice if you can incorporate more calmness and a lesser workload with Call Deflection to WhatsApp. Currently it is already making our processes much more efficient, something that will only grow further in the coming period.”

Severs Breeman answers many customer questions via WhatsApp instead of by phone. But it doesn’t stop there. In fact, they want to use the messaging channel for other applications in the future to further reduce phone traffic. For example, the idea is for the workshop to send a service appointment (confirmation and reminder), quotation, completion report or other message to the customer via an app at the push of a button. A process that does not involve a phone!

Severs Breeman BMW & MINI’s experience with WhatsApp Call Deflection

“The intended goal is to reduce telephone pressure on our employees, especially in the workshop. Secondly, we want this to improve the customer experience by giving customers the option to skip the telephone queue. So far, I see that it works. Every conversation via WhatsApp saves another phone call for our employees. Together with Saysimple, we have opened a new chapter in customer communication. We can speak to our customers in a new and surprising way, at the time and via a channel that suits them.”