Phone, Email, or WhatsApp: Reaching a Customer Who Has Gone Quiet

You have sent three emails. The first was friendly, the second was firmer, the third had "OVERDUE" in the subject line. Nothing came back. The invoice is ₦850,000, it is 45 days past due, and the contact who answered you within the hour in March has gone completely silent.

Silence is usually not a refusal to pay. Most of the time it is an invoice sitting in a queue nobody owns, an approval stalled on someone's desk, or a person avoiding you because they have no good news to give. Either way, you need a human being to make a decision, and email is a weak tool for that.

What each channel is actually good for

Email is your paper trail. It is where the invoice lives, where the terms are, and what you fall back on if this ever turns into a dispute. It is also the easiest thing in the world to ignore, because ignoring it costs your customer nothing. Before you conclude the channel is dead, make sure your messages are worth opening: plenty of unanswered chasers are just badly written reminder emails.

A phone call is what produces a decision. Someone has to answer, someone has to say a date out loud, and staying silent while another person waits on the line is uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point. You are asking for a commitment from a person who cannot forward you to a folder.

WhatsApp is where a lot of Nigerian business actually happens. Your contact may leave an email untouched for two weeks and reply to a WhatsApp message in nine minutes, because that is where they spend the working day. It is also less formal, which makes it easier for them to tell you the truth: "the payment is with our MD, he travels back on Thursday." That is worth more than four unanswered emails.

Use all three, each for what it is good at. Chase by phone and WhatsApp. Record by email.

The sequence that works

When email stops landing, escalate rather than sending a fourth one.

1. Send a short WhatsApp message. Name the invoice, the amount, and ask one direct question: "When can we expect payment on invoice 1042, ₦850,000, due 12 May?" Easy to answer, hard to misread.
2. Call if there is no reply within a day. Do not open with an apology. State the invoice, the amount, how overdue it is, and ask when it will be paid.
3. Get a specific date on the call. Not "next week", not "soon", and definitely not "once our client pays us". A date.
4. Confirm it in writing the same hour. A three-line email: "Thanks for the call. Confirming payment of ₦850,000 on invoice 1042 on 20 June, as agreed."

Step four is the one people skip, and it is the one doing the work. A date said on the phone can be forgotten, denied, or quietly renegotiated. A date written down and unchallenged becomes the thing you hold them to, and it gives you a clean reason to call again on the 21st.

Find the person who can actually release the money

Your contact is often not your real problem. The person who ordered the work is rarely the person who signs off the payment, and an invoice can sit between those two for six weeks without anybody lying to you.

So ask, plainly: "Who approves this, and what do they need from me?" That single question moves more invoices than another reminder ever will. Sometimes finance never received the invoice. Sometimes it was rejected for a missing PO number, or it needs a signed delivery note nobody thought to ask you for.

Get the name and number of someone in accounts payable, and send any missing document the same day, because every time your invoice bounces it goes back to the bottom of a queue. Chasing the wrong person politely for a month is a common way to lose a quarter, which is why the habits that get you paid are largely about who you talk to and when.

When your contact has left the company

Sooner or later a chase ends with "he is no longer with us", or the number simply stops connecting. Treat that as an escalation, not a dead end.

Go around rather than through. Call the company's main line and ask for accounts payable, find whoever replaced your contact, and use anyone else you know inside the organisation. Then send the new person a fresh email that assumes none of the history: invoice number, amount, date issued, what was delivered, with proof of delivery attached.

Do not vent about the previous contact, and do not make the new person feel accused of something they did not do. They inherited a mess, and you are the supplier making it easy for them to clear one item off it, which is a far better position than being the vendor whose calls they screen.

Keep the record while you chase

Chasing across three channels only works if it is written down: who you called, what they said, the date they promised, whether they hit it. Arvalox keeps that history against the invoice itself, so your follow-up email writes itself from what happened on the call, and you know whether this is the second time a customer has moved a date or the fifth.