Panasonic scales customer support and increases NPS without adding headcount.

Panasonic’s customer service complexity comes from its scale. A single centralised team supports customers across a continent, in more than 20 languages, covering products that vary significantly in technical complexity and customer profile.

The team’s existing channel setup had a specific structural gap:

• Email as the primary out-of-hours option: When customers contacted Panasonic outside business hours, email was the only asynchronous option. Email is slow, one-directional, and lacks the features (photo sharing, read receipts, conversational threading) that make support interactions efficient. Customers in Italy, Spain, and Germany often prefer messaging apps for everyday communication, and email felt like a friction-filled alternative.
• No photo sharing in existing channels: Diagnosing hardware issues often requires seeing the problem. Web chat didn’t support photo sharing, which meant agents had to work from customer descriptions alone. This extended conversations and increased the likelihood of misdiagnosis.
• Fragmented multi-language support: Supporting 23 languages across 28 countries without language-specific agents required workarounds. Live translation capability didn’t exist in the existing setup, which constrained the team’s ability to serve customers in their preferred language.
• Low survey completion rates: Feedback collection from existing channels was limited. Post-chat surveys had low completion rates, leaving the team with an incomplete picture of how customers actually experienced the support interaction.

The company knew WhatsApp was the right channel. Its adoption across European markets is deep; in some countries, it’s the primary messaging platform for daily communication. The problem was execution. Panasonic’s existing CRM vendor had failed to deliver WhatsApp integration for over a year.

Quiq provisioned Panasonic’s WhatsApp Business account and integrated the Quiq agent desktop inside their existing CRM. Contact centre agents continued working in the same environment they’d always used, but could now receive and respond to WhatsApp messages without switching systems.

The deployment was built around several capabilities specific to Panasonic’s operational context:

• CRM integration from week one: The Quiq agent desktop sits inside Panasonic’s existing CRM, so agents work in one environment. Customer history, conversation context, and escalation paths all flow through the same system they already use for other channels.
• Live, simultaneous translation: Quiq’s platform provides real-time translation during conversations, enabling agents to support customers across European markets regardless of language. An agent who speaks English can exchange messages with a customer writing in Italian; both see the conversation in their own language.
• In-context CSAT surveys: Quiq and Panasonic added feedback surveys to the end of WhatsApp conversations, embedded in the same messaging thread rather than sent separately. Because customers can return to the WhatsApp thread at their convenience, survey completion rates doubled to 20% compared to Panasonic’s previous feedback mechanism.
• Photo sharing natively supported: WhatsApp’s native photo capabilities are available to every customer who contacts Panasonic through the channel. When a customer’s appliance shows a fault code or visible damage, they can send a photo directly in the conversation. Agents can diagnose faster and resolve more accurately.
• Asynchronous by design: Unlike web chat, which requires both parties to be present simultaneously, WhatsApp allows the conversation to pause and resume naturally. A customer can send a question at 9 PM and pick up the agent’s response the next morning. This fits the way most people actually use messaging apps.

The pilot launched in Germany. Based on the engagement rates, Panasonic rolled the same setup to 12 additional markets across Europe, bringing the total to 13 markets supported in 12 languages.

Hardware fault diagnosis: A customer in Spain notices an error code on their Panasonic appliance and contacts support via WhatsApp. They send a photo of the display alongside their question. The agent sees the photo immediately, identifies the fault code from the image, and provides a diagnostic response without asking the customer to describe what they’re seeing. What would have been a multi-message exchange becomes a two-message resolution.

Out-of-hours contact: A customer in Italy contacts Panasonic at 9 PM with a question about a product they’re setting up. Under the previous model, they would have sent an email that sat in a queue overnight. With WhatsApp, the message arrives in the queue and receives a response the next morning, in the same conversation thread the customer opened the night before. No follow-up email required, no context lost.

Post-interaction feedback: At the end of a WhatsApp conversation, the customer receives a brief in-chat survey. Because it arrives in their existing WhatsApp thread rather than a separate email or pop-up, many complete it later in the day at their own convenience. The completion rate doubled compared to Panasonic’s previous survey mechanism.

For the contact centre team, the biggest operational change has been in the agent experience. Centralised reporting from the Quiq platform means the team can measure performance across all 13 markets from a single interface, rather than aggregating data from separate regional systems. Language barriers that previously limited staffing flexibility are less constraining with live translation in place.

The WhatsApp channel has also changed the team’s relationship with customer feedback. With a 20% survey completion rate, the team now has a meaningful sample of post-interaction sentiment data they didn’t have before. That data shapes decisions about knowledge content, agent training, and which product lines generate the most recurring issues.

Six weeks after engaging Quiq, Panasonic had WhatsApp live in Germany. Within months, the channel had expanded to 13 European markets and become the company’s highest-rated support channel.

• 75+ NPS on WhatsApp, Panasonic’s highest-rated support channel across all contact methods
• 13 European markets served via WhatsApp, with 12 languages supported through live translation
• 20% post-chat survey completion rate, double the rate achieved through the previous feedback mechanism
• Six-week deployment timeline from kickoff to first market launch
• Photo sharing enables faster and more accurate diagnosis of hardware issues
• Centralised reporting across all 13 markets from a single Quiq interface