With customer service at the heart of telecom provider 50+ Mobiel, number portability should be as easy as possible. The Virtual Porting Agent (VPA) turns that vision into reality, says Niels van Caulil, Operational Manager: "The VPA is a step forward for both our staff and our customers."
Before adding the VPA, 50+ Mobiel had been using the Number Portability Gateway for some time. This solution, handling all porting processes, worked well. The customer-side process could be better though.
"We had a simple page set up, where you could enter an SMS code to validate the porting," says Van Caulil. “There was also an alternate page to enter the customer number. While it worked, it wasn't that customer friendly."
He explains: "We have a target audience that prefers to contact customer service. The pages were not optimally set up for customer use, and were mainly used by our staff during support calls."
To improve usability, PXS replaced these outdated pages by Virtual Porting Agent late 2023. "A place for customers to view their porting request, and automatically handle errors," Van Caulil says.
User-friendly and secure
The launch of the agent turned out to be a great success, says Van Caulil. "The VPA is more customer-friendly and user-friendly. Now, customers can easily see the status of their porting request. All they have to do is verify their phone number. It also improved visually, completely branded in the 50+ Mobiel visual identity."
Implementation ran smoothly. "As soon as the agent was live, it instantly worked as expected, including all branding."
And the key result: number portability inquiries went down. "Our target audience still likes someone to have a look, just in case. But thanks to the clear information and automatic error handling, that’s much easier for our staff. Both the customer and us can clearly see where things go wrong."
Continuously improving
Van Caulil sees potential for future improvement, mainly on the communication front. "That’s an ongoing development", he says. "Currently, our customers are redirected to the VPA for all porting actions. We also added references to the agent in our knowledge base, in articles about number portability."
And what about improvements to the VPA itself? "It does exactly what we want it to do: let customers act independently as much as possible, without our involvement. There are always improvements to be made in error handling. Fortunately, PXS runs regular updates."
Consequently, the cooperation between PXS and 50+ Mobiel is excellent. "We never had any problems," he says. "PXS is accessible – requests are followed up within a day. Our technical department can access a ticketing system that we rarely have to use, but when needed, PXS is there."
Also interested in the Virtual Porting Agent? Read more about the possibilities here, or contact us directly.
