Belgium’s KBC Bank has become the first financial institution in the country to offer customers the ability to chat with the bank through the WhatsApp messenger app.
The service, available on weekdays from 8am to 10pm and on weekends from 9am to 5pm, is intended to provide quick answers to general banking and insurance questions from live staff.
The bank has seen a steady rise in the number of chats and calls through its KBC Live service. The number of video chats was heading towards 3,000 per month by the end of 2017, while the number of ordinary chat sessions grew from around 2,500 per month at the start of 2017, to around 7,500 from September onwards.
Karin van Hoecke, general manager of Mobile First, explained: “WhatsApp is a very fast and easy to access chat app that’s already familiar and intuitive to many of our customers. Now that it’s technically possible to use it for business purposes, we’re proud to be the first to offer it to our customers so they get even better service and availability from us.
“We’re testing it first with our Dutch-speaking customers, before expanding to the other official languages in Belgium and English. We want to give our customers the ability to contact us in a variety of ways.”
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