THE CHALLENGE

Ready customers, closed doors

Blackberry Hearing has spent a decade making hearing care accessible. Free hearing tests, clinics from Dublin to Galway, free home visits for those who need them. But the moment of intent, when someone finally decides to do something about their hearing, rarely respects opening hours.

Luke Higgins, Blackberry Hearing’s Analytics and Insights Director, could see the gap in the data. Some evenings the missed-call log was empty. Others held more than a dozen: people who had rung back when they were free, precisely when nobody could pick up.

"That’s a cohort of people for us that we don’t get to. They’re kind of ready, but we’re just not available"
Luke Higgins, Analytics and Insights Director, Blackberry Hearing

Four problems sat on top of each other.

• Speed to lead. Evening and weekend enquiries waited hours, sometimes more than a day. As Luke puts it, the faster you get to an enquiry, the more chance you have of success.

• The phone is hard for their customers. Many callers are hard of hearing. Staff would sometimes need to step outside and shout down a headset to try to communicate. SMS and email were the fallback, and neither can book anything.

• Campaigns created work rather than removing it. A good SMS blast drew a 5 to 10 percent response, and every response became a manual callback task in the CRM.

• No booking software. Appointments live in the Zoho CRM diary. There was no online booking of any kind, so every appointment needed a human on the Blackberry side.

WHAT THEY BUILT

One assistant, three doors

Rather than bolt a chatbot onto the website, Blackberry Hearing built a single assistant with a name, a voice and real capability, then opened her up channel by channel. They called her Áine, and chose a voice that sounds friendly and professional.

Áine does not answer questions about the business. She acts inside it. Momntum integrated her directly with the live Zoho CRM diary, so she searches real availability across the clinic network, books, cancels and reschedules actual appointments, and logs every conversation as notes, tasks and leads in the workflow the team already uses.

The web widget went live first, WhatsApp days later, then the Zoho integration, then booking on the live diary. In July the main phone line began routing to Áine after 5:30pm. It was switched on one evening just after the team went home, and twenty minutes later a real customer rang.

WHAT CHANGED

From “we’ll call you back” to a five-second answer

Across thousands of two-way customer conversations and tens of thousands of messages, the experience now looks like this.

• Answers in seconds. Median reply time is five seconds. 99.9 percent of customer messages get a reply inside a minute, at 9pm on a Tuesday as reliably as 11am on a Thursday.

• Genuinely always on. Áine has replied in 23 of the 24 hours of the Dublin day, across all seven days of the week. The only silent hour is 4 to 5am, because nobody has asked yet.

• A whole appointment lifecycle, not just answers. Alongside the bookings, Áine runs live availability searches, handles cancellations and reschedules, and has written well over a thousand notes and follow-up tasks into Zoho. Only about 1 percent of conversations needed a person to step in. Out-of-warranty repairs and clinical judgement are deliberately escalated to the team.

THE OUTCOME

Every booking is a person in front of an audiologist

Booking is the number Blackberry Hearing watches, because a booked consultation is where care begins. Since the capability went live, Áine has been completing appointments end to end: finding the slot in the live diary, confirming it with the customer, writing it into Zoho. Volume rose sharply in her first full month of booking.

Almost a quarter of those bookings, 23 percent, were made outside office hours: the exact conversations that used to go to voicemail. Around 88 percent came through WhatsApp. And because Áine handles cancellations and reschedules on the spot, freed slots go back into the diary instead of becoming no-shows.

Inbound conversations have grown every single month, up more than 1,200 percent from the first month live to the most recent. WhatsApp alone grew 69 percent month on month in the latest period.

OUTBOUND

Campaigns that talk back, and book

Blackberry Hearing’s marketing used to be one way. SMS out, callbacks in, staff in the middle. Now every campaign message opens a two-way conversation with Áine on the other end, and she can close the loop by booking the appointment inside the same chat.

Across dozens of campaigns, from referral asks to warranty check-ins to the launch of the Widex Allure AI hearing aid, set against what the same audience used to receive:

Check-in campaigns to existing customers pull more than 15 percent engagement by Luke’s own count. But the reply is where the real change sits. What used to land in a staff member’s queue as a callback task is now a conversation Áine finishes herself, and increasingly finishes with a booked appointment. Most of those in-chat bookings came from the media-rich Allure AI format, immediately the best performer they have run, and booking inside a campaign only became possible partway through this period, so these campaigns are capable of more than the numbers yet shown.

The check-in campaigns to in-warranty customers also did something nobody planned for, lifting interest in the latest technology and bringing upgrade appointments forward from customers who were not due back yet.

VOICE

The phone line that never rings out

Since going live on the main line, Áine has been answering calls that would previously have hit voicemail. Fifty-nine percent of them come outside office hours, and the average call runs under two minutes.

“The customer actually didn’t have a problem talking to Áine. She understood exactly what their complaint was and what needed to happen in order to resolve it. So the customer is reassured"
Luke Higgins, Analytics and Insights Director, Blackberry Hearing

For a hearing care company, voice AI has a poignant edge case. Some callers struggle to hear Áine just as they would struggle to hear a person. That is shaping the roadmap: Áine will offer a handoff to WhatsApp mid-call, so the conversation can finish in writing.

IMPACT ON THE TEAM

What they stopped doing

• Monitoring campaign inboxes, and turning every reply into a manual callback task. Áine now handles the replies, including the booking, without anyone watching.

• Triaging confirmation calls through a priority hierarchy, because the team could never confirm every appointment by phone.

• Processing voicemail from after-hours callers the following morning.

• Writing up CRM notes, which now arrive already documented.

None of this replaced a person. Audiologist time is the scarcest resource in the business, and protecting it is the entire point. Staff have become, in Luke’s phrase, little Áine champions, using her internally for product questions.

“The most important outcome of Áine is not automation. It is protected clinic time. Áine does not replace the audiologist. She protects the audiologist’s time"
Luke Higgins, Analytics and Insights Director, Blackberry Hearing

“Áine is not about replacing the human side of hearing care. She’s about protecting it"
Matt Gleeson, Managing Director, Blackberry Hearing

WHAT'S NEXT

“She is a platform”

Luke’s own public framing is the roadmap. Áine should be seen as more than a launch. On the shared roadmap now:

• Outbound voice. A tightly scoped pilot in which Áine calls enquiries the team has already left voicemails for, with escalation to a person or a handoff to WhatsApp.

• Instant lead follow-up. A form filled at 9:00pm gets a WhatsApp from Áine to assist immediately.

• AI-led appointment confirmations, replacing SMS reminders and human confirmation calls, with Áine handling the rebooking reply herself.

• A staff-facing assistant, so clinic staff can say can benefit from Áine’s capabilities further. Plus aftercare on the same rails.

Figures from Momntum production data covering the first four months live. Office hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:30, Europe/Dublin. Campaign bookings count only appointments completed inside the same chat.