A “2.0 voicemail” that transforms missed customer calls into “business opportunities”. Instead of leaving a message in a voicemail box, the customer is contacted by text message and can, for example, obtain a reservation or an appointment. The merchant has access to a dashboard to evaluate the customer conversion rate, up to five times higher than that of a traditional voicemail.
Posted at 1:45 a.m.
Updated at 8:00 a.m.
Who ?
In 2021, Benoit Archambault, graduate of HEC Montréal in business administration, leaves after 15 years the company he co-founded and of which he was president, Succès scolaire, the Quebec leader in school tutoring with more than one thousand employees. After a year and a half of break, he is ready for a new adventure inspired by a need identified at Succès scolaire: how to convert the numerous missed calls into income? Missed calls, he says, are those where “the customer is not speaking to a human being” because offices are closed or during peak periods. Most customers don’t leave a voicemail message and are lost.
“I said to myself: in theory, if I have more calls, I have more income,” says Mr. Archambault. This was not the case. It clicked: there must be something better than a voicemail! »
On May 5, 2022, after a few months of experiments and the development of a prototype, Talksoon was officially founded. Mr. Archambault is the CEO, Samuel Tissot joins as co-founder and head of development in July 2022, and Julien Lapensée joins the team in October 2023 as co-founder and head of data and artificial intelligence (AI). The former general director of School Success and Mr. Archambault’s spouse, Elizabeth Berkovich, as well as two developers complete the team. The product is marketed in January 2023. The young company has some 150 customers, “all over Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia,” specifies Mr. Archambault, “many restaurants, car dealerships, golf courses, “tourist businesses”.
The product
Let’s see concretely what happens when you call a merchant using the Talksoon platform. If no employee takes the call and the customer has not left a message in the voicemail box, the latter receives a text message giving them more information about the business. If he leaves a message on the voicemail, it is analyzed by Talksoon’s AI and he receives a text message offering, for example, to reserve a table at a restaurant or make an appointment at a dealership.
The Talksoon telephone system is integrated invisibly by transferring a call to that of the merchant. If the customer does not have a cell phone, this information is still found in a complete dashboard showing daily call statistics, message subjects, number of text messages sent, and interactions obtained.
While only 20% of customers leave a message on a voicemail, a rate which drops to less than 10% for restaurants, more than 65% will accept an interaction by text, specifies Mr. Archambault.
A voicemail box is a black box. Whereas with Talksoon, you can follow a call: if the customer didn’t book, was there a problem? We can go so far as to integrate into each employee’s voicemail boxes. He sees, for example, that he missed three calls and the text messages that were sent automatically.
Samuel Tissot, co-founder of Talksoon and head of development
The Talksoon platform is billed according to call volume and complexity of requests, “starting at $100 per month, but there are so many different formats,” says the CEO.
Challenges
Most of the efforts consisted of developing the technological platform. “It seems simple, but just knowing if a link has been clicked is a challenge,” explains Julien Lapensée. We had to develop our system. »
“There are a lot of platforms talking to each other,” adds Mr. Archambault. We have several tens of thousands that we manage, our vision is to manage tens of millions of them. »
The future
At Talksoon, we would like to go beyond the current basic information, mainly focused on reservations, and offer full integration with merchant systems, for example those of car dealerships.
“Is your car ready?” We are heading towards that,” specifies Mr. Archambault.
The young company does not want to skip ahead and has been especially busy since January 2023 demonstrating the reliability of its platform. “There are telephone flows that we could do with AI, the product will evolve,” adds the CEO.
