Is customer service a differentiator for fintechs?
The short answer … YES!
Fintechs who recognize that world-class customer service is inextricably linked to delivering great customer experience (CX) will win. No matter how amazing your mobile app or digital UX is, you have to be ready to help your customers when there’s a problem. And, when you’re dealing with people’s money, there will always be a problem eventually.
Ubiquity’s SVP of Fintech Peg Johnson shared her insights on the role of customer service with the startups in cohort 5 of Falls Fintech, the fintech accelerator established by Central Payments, a market-leading, full-scale, digital payments bank. She also sat down with Falls Fintech founders: Central Payments President Trent Sorbe and Executive Vice President of Strategy Nikkee Rhody to dive deeper into how Ubiquity works with Central Payments and other fintechs to transform customer support from a cost center into a value creator.
Watch the Fintech Brews & News Podcast Click above to hear from Falls Fintech Founders Nikkee Rhody and Trent Sorbe, along with Ubiquity’s SVP of Fintech Peg Johnson.
Here are a few highlights condensed from the discussion.
Nikkee Rhody: People often view customer service as a commodity, something that’s a necessary cost, but you guys really take pride and passion in how customers are treated along the journey. It’s less of a must-have cost and more like this is something that’s really critical to program and fintech success.
Peg Johnson: Exactly. What differentiates fintechs is the way they deliver service–that 360-degree communication. At Ubiquity, we’re the team that data mines; we are that extension of your fintech to be able to hear what your customers are saying day in and day out. We’re the people listening and analyzing information and sharing it back to your product group. If we’re not doing that, our fintech clients can’t pivot and won’t be able to adapt to what their customers are saying.
Trent Sorbe: We spend a lot of time with software engineers and developers, and they want to build amazing digital user experiences. I think they often forget that, “Wait a minute, I may have to have human-to-human interaction to be able to explain something.” I think that gets forgotten a lot as products are built in fintech … How important it is that there’s a reliable number for customers to reach, that there’s a reliable and educated person on the other end who can solve a problem in that one call.
Treat Each Dollar Like It’s Their Last
TS: When we first started Central Payments, we had a saying we still use today: Treat each customer’s balance as though it’s all they have. If you think about that from a customer contact perspective, when they contact you, many times there’s a concern, something doesn’t look right. They need to have something explained to them, and there’s a heightened level of anxiety because, in many cases with our customers, that dollar matters to them. So when we were talking with companies we wanted to represent us to our customers, it was really important that we come at it with that mindset.
One of the things I really enjoy about Ubiquity is the degree to which you collaborate with us to make sure that what’s important to us is passed through to that consumer. Can you talk a little bit about that collaboration process?
PJ: We are a customizable shop; what that means is every agent or analyst is dedicated to your program. In other words, they’re not working on other programs]. We spend time so your team leads, your operational managers, your Quality Assurance teams all understand fintech, and they understand your brand.
Then, let’s say that there’s something that the customer just continues to not understand; we can feed that back up to your team and recommend changes to policies, procedures, and how that’s communicated back to the customer.
TS: That communication is so important because it’s two-way. We want to make sure you’re explaining us well to our customers, but then we also need to hear from you. That’s particularly important for early stage fintechs. Pivots happen all the time in fintech, and some of those happen because your customer experience may not have been what you thought it should be. Well, who’s on the front lines listening to that? That feedback we get back from Ubiquity is critically important, and we use it to evaluate user experience, user flows, and those sorts of things to try to create maximum efficiency and maximum service. You’re our listening ears.