WhatsApp Business: the phone number as core
WhatsApp Business: why the phone number is the foundation Using…
Your customer calls. Gets a phone menu. Waits. Hangs up. Tries the chatbot. Gets no answer. Sends an email. Hears nothing.
And then your customer calls a competitor. Not because your product is bad. Because you are unreachable.
The National Voice Monitor 2026 surveyed 1,016 Dutch consumers. The research was carried out by Markteffect in collaboration with Y.digital, the Customer Service Federation, Speakup and Vodafone Business.
52% name long waiting times as the biggest frustration. Right behind: non-functioning chatbots at 50%. The two are nearly equal. Frustration with waiting times is slowly declining. Frustration with chatbots is growing. Next year chatbots will probably be number one.
And then this. Only 12% of questions put to chatbots are answered correctly. Twelve per cent. The rest are redirected, misunderstood or not helped at all. That same customer then has to call again. Wait again. Tell their story again.
Four in ten consumers say: I just want to speak to a human being. No smarter technology. Just someone who listens.
Interactions handled entirely by a staff member most often score an 8 or higher. Interactions handled entirely by a chatbot? A 5 or lower. The customer is not unclear about what they want.
At the start of 2025, ZGT Ophthalmology and Spectrum Eye Care merged into Spectrum Eye Hospital ZGT. The merger was intended to strengthen eye care in the Twente region.
The result was the opposite.
Patients could no longer make appointments. The phone went unanswered. Emails remained without reply for weeks. The online portal did not work. A father with a six-year-old child who urgently needed an ophthalmologist could not get through anywhere. A man of 84 did not know whether his cataract operation was still going ahead.
Sandstep Healthcare acknowledged the problems. Staff shortages. Non-functioning systems. Teething troubles. Six months later still not fully resolved.
That is not an incident. That is what happens when an organisation changes and communication does not change with it.
In March 2026, the holding company behind online retailer Fonq filed for a suspension of payments. The webshop frozen. The chat function deactivated. The phone unanswered. On Trustpilot, hundreds of customers wrote about undelivered furniture and outstanding refunds.
The pattern is always the same. As soon as a company comes under financial pressure, customer service is the first to go. Not the product. Accessibility.
A retail analyst put it this way: when investors become more cautious, customers notice immediately. Your customer sees it before your shareholder does.
The lesson is simple. Being unreachable is not a customer service problem. It is a signal that something is structurally wrong.
There is a persistent story in the market. Nobody calls any more. Everything goes via chat, via email, via self-service.
That story is not true.
Telephony is still the preferred channel for Dutch consumers. For complex questions, the majority choose the phone. The Voice Monitor shows that consumers choose very deliberately. For simple questions they accept a chatbot. For anything more complex, more personal or more urgent, they want a human being. On the phone.
At the same time, WhatsApp is growing as a complementary channel. Not as a replacement. As a complement. Customers want to communicate at their own pace. Send a message when it suits them. And receive a reply on the same number they also call.
Calling and WhatsApp are not competitors. They are two sides of the same phone number.
Organisations invest in chatbots. In phone menus. In ticketing systems. In email flows. Each channel gets its own system. Its own team. Its own queue.
The customer notices. They have to tell their story three times. First to the chatbot. Then to the phone agent. Then again via email. Nobody knows what has already been discussed.
The problem is not which channel you offer. The problem is that the channels do not talk to each other. The customer calls a number. Sends a WhatsApp to that same number. And nobody in the organisation sees it as one conversation.
Every person has a phone number. It is the only contact detail that works everywhere. In every country. On every device. Via every channel.
You can call via that number. You can send an SMS. You can send a WhatsApp message. And soon RCS. Four channels. One number. That is infrastructure.
Organisations that centralise the phone number organise accessibility. Not per channel. Per customer. One number. One inbox. One conversation history. Whether the customer calls, sends a WhatsApp or texts.
The staff member changes. The number does not. The customer does not need to remember which channel to use. They know the number. That is enough.
RippleCom brings calling, SMS and WhatsApp together on one business number. In a Team Inbox where the whole team collaborates. Every interaction recorded. Not on the individual, but on the organisation. From €149 per month. Cancellable per calendar month.
Call your own organisation. How long does it take before someone picks up? What happens when nobody picks up? Where does the customer end up?
Send a WhatsApp to your own business number. Do you get a reply? Within an hour? Or does the message disappear into a personal phone of a staff member who might leave next month?
Ask your team: if a customer calls and then sends a WhatsApp about the same subject, do you see that as one conversation? Or as two separate interactions?
If you cannot answer any of those questions properly, your accessibility is not a strength. It is a risk.
Curious how your organisation measures up? Take the free communication scan and find out in five minutes. Or book a strategy session directly.
Sources: National Voice Monitor 2026 (Y.digital, Markteffect, Customer Service Federation, Speakup, Vodafone Business. Representative survey of 1,016 respondents, December 2025 to February 2026) | Wonen360.nl on Fonq, March 2026 | Spectrum Eye Hospital ZGT, merger effective 1 January 2025
