The blog

THoMer Dennis caught up with Femke De Roo (BASE) and Gertjan Dewaele (Ingenico) over coffee, to look back on their joint project: a telecom chatbot with integrated payment in Messenger, a first in Belgium.

At the start of 2016, mobile phone operator BASE Company was officially acquired by Telenet, one of Belgium's leading telecom providers. BASE has always been a young and dynamic company with a strong focus on a great user experience. Looking at the fact that 60% of consumers use chatbots to interact with businesses and the use of Facebook Messenger is popular amongst all age groups, the Telenet team contacted BotBakery, specialized in bringing together artificial intelligence, user interfaces, personalization and user experience through the creation of chatbots. Together with Ingenico, BotBakery’s remit was to set up Belgium’s first telecom recharging ‘top-up’ chatbot with an integrated payment module in Messenger to recharge prepaid cards. BotBakery, part of Upthrust, a spin-off of The House of Marketing and the digital implementation pillar of Quanteus Group, proves with the chatbot its strength to translate promising digital technologies into practical applications. Mobile payments in Belgium today are mainly done through webportals. Now, with the launch of BASE’s Top-up chatbot, there is a breakthrough to recharge in a chat functionality, with no need to leave the chat. Until now, BASE customers needed to go to the website or to the night shop to buy a scratch card or they had to download an application to recharge their prepaid card. As of today, those customers can recharge with only a few clicks within their Facebook Messenger. The only thing they need to do is to accept the privacy statement, give the phone number they want to top up, define the amount they want to recharge and fill in their payment details.

According to our e-commerce barometer 2017, 27% more e-commerce websites were launched in 2017 compared to the year before. Transaction numbers increased by 39%, which equals over 60 million transactions. Those numbers indicate e-commerce in Belgium is on the rise, regardless of company size. Surfing along on the wave, Jacqmotte, a brand of Dutch coffee and tea company Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE), joined the online retail market by launching their own webshop for a new freshly roasted coffee range.

Messer Group is a producer and distributor of industrial gases with a complex distribution model which combines both direct deliveries and deliveries through a depot network. The chemical company has always been very sales oriented, but in recent years embraced the idea that marketing could be a vital support for sales, especially when it comes to the generation, nurturing and qualification of leads. In June 2017, they contacted us to help them with the implementation of Marketing Automation with the ultimate aim of going from 90% to 50% sales dependency by 2020/2025.

Taking up the challenges Gantrex is active world-wide in rail fixing products & solutions, especially for cranes in harbours, but also for e.g. warehouses. Gantrex has been growing in a very decentral way. Seen the fact that local managers had a lot of decision freedom, there is not real company-wide image and marketing material. On the other hand, as harbours are important customers and they have gone through a recent centralization trend, more consistency & focus is needed for Gantrex. We accepted the challenge to rationalize and optimize their marketing materials assuring a better worldwide brand image.