How Fintech Companies Can Scale Customer Support Operations for Growth

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is critical to the growth and success of any business, especially fintech companies, as they are directly involved in ensuring the safety of customers’ funds.

Intercom is a software company that specializes in building customer engagement software for messaging between businesses and their customers. The company hosts a monthly youtube webinar series – CX for Growth – that focuses on various customer experience topics with the goal of helping startups drive growth in their businesses. In the latest episode of the webinar series, customer operations leaders from two of Nigeria’s leading fintech companies, Norah Ikoh, Head of CX Operations at Kuda Bank, and Olaseike Ibojo, Customer Success Manager, Disputes at Paystack, shared their thoughts on scaling fintech customer support operations for growth.

The discussion focused on three main questions:

– What are the self-service support foundations you need to start?

– Where and how do you build in automation, personalization and proactive approaches?

– How do you develop your culture and team at scale?

With over four million customers in Kuda Bank, Ikoh started the conversation about a self-service support fund in view of the large scale of customers the bank has to deal with. “When Kuda Bank started, we noticed that when customers contact us, they always ask for self-help solutions to fix their problems themselves without having to contact us at the slightest inconvenience. This prompted us to launch a self-help feature.”

The Kuda self-help feature allows customers to limit and unlimit their accounts upon suspicion of a hack, fraudulent activity or unauthorized transactions. The self-help feature allows customers to block their account and change their password to regain control of their account. There are also chatbots that respond to customer inquiries to rectify simple problems, and this gives the bank agents plenty of time and bandwidth to respond to the more complex ones. Intercom produced a starter kit that shows you how to build a help desk that will make your customers self-reliant, read the kit here.

While Ikoh communicates a lot directly with customers at Kuda, Ibojo explains the self-help dynamic at Paystack, which mainly deals with businesses or merchants. “What we’ve done over the last few years is we’ve leveraged the workflows and automation that exist on our tools. Second, we use the human resources we have to create self-help content and articles. Third, internally, we’ve created a workflow that recognizes keywords in an email so the first response the customer gets is an article that talks about what they’re trying to solve, and the responses have been very positive about how useful the feature has been.”

Additionally, Paystack introduced dashboard support where businesses and merchants can find articles, video content, documentation guides, etc. while interacting with the product. Finally, on self-help support, Paystack reviews data on reported issues every week, and in doing so, they discovered that many people were asking why Paystack is charging them. Therefore, they created a tool called the transaction lookup tool that customers (businesses and merchants) can search for why they were debited and other follow-up questions after attributing a few card details. This particular feature has been very useful based on feedback and according to our data it is the 6th most visited page on the Paystack website.

When it comes to deploying automation and personalizations, Ikoh explains how Kuda Bank can sound personal when interacting with their over four million customer base using automation.

“Initially, we send birthday and anniversary messages to customers when they have been with us for a year, and we are working on adding more milestone celebrations. We started by sending customers the same messages for these celebrations. Last month we switched things up and started sending different messages to different customers for these milestones, so five customers have different messages, and the feedback so far has been really good.”

Kuda also recently introduced chatbots, which are still being tested internally. The chatbots will help resolve hundreds of thousands of card disputes experienced by the bank by picking transactions from the CRM tool, logging them against the service providers and providing feedback that bank agents can respond to and sort out complaints and ultimately close the ticket. Automating this process reduces human involvement in fixing problems, prevents team member burnout, and allows them to focus on other problems that can only be solved by human intervention and interaction.

Meanwhile, according to Ibojo, all support issues at Paystack require an element of human interaction depending on the stage and age of the tickets. “If an agent has an email conversation back and forth and up to four or five emails have been exchanged, it’s high time you pick up the phone to have a phone conversation and explain things.”

Another example is, if a merchant or potential business wants to integrate Paystack into their system, at some point the not-so-tech-savvy merchants or businesses will need technical assistance from Paystack to understand the need of the merchant and how to proceed . the integration. This can only be effectively achieved through a phone call or interaction with our technical team.

In the last part of the discussion which focused on scaling the team and developing CX team culture, Ikoh points out that culture plays a very big role in developing a team and that the culture of a team is determined by how the team members engage with each team. others and do their work. “I built my team structure in such a way that I am able to pay attention to their needs, have periodic one-on-one sessions with them, understand their pain points at work, their goals, where they come from, where they should and how I can help them achieve it.

“I also communicate back to them, listen to them and try to understand them to ultimately help them do their work better. This helps my team as I don’t have to micromanage them because I’ve built a relationship with them and I engaging them continuously,” Ikoh added.

In addition, Ibojo highlighted the importance of capacity building. Building capacity in your team and playing to the strengths of each team member can help them specialize.

The webinar concluded with Ikoh and Ibojo sharing some KPIs used to measure team performance and customer satisfaction. The first is to be sure that the customer’s complaints are actually resolved and that it is done politely; this is the core of customer satisfaction, they said. Secondly, the response and resolution time for complaints must be good because customers want problems resolved immediately. Finally, clearing customer backlog and retention, especially for the customer team, is a measurable performance metric to pay attention to.

Intercom empowers more than 25,000 businesses worldwide such as Amazon, Coda, Notion, Living Spaces and others to build better relationships with their customers. If you are a beginner, you can apply to join at an early stage and get a 95% discount for the first year. Apply to join here.