Simple Finance is a US-based challenger bank, offering simpler banking services to Americans. Read how they have achieved a 90% reduction in case resolution time, leading to a 20% increase in Customer Satisfaction.
While disrupting the banking industry with their new way of providing banking services, an important focus for Simple Finance is their customer service. They want to ensure that their customer service is kind and helpful.
To make sure that customers are satisfied with their staff and their services, Simple Finance tracks both the customer relationship with their brand (NPS reviewed monthly) and also satisfaction at different touchpoints (CSAT tracked in real-time after every customer service interaction).
Like many other companies, Simple Finance found it challenging to generate insights from feedback that would lead to concrete business impact. The surveying tool they used to collect feedback, despite having a myriad of features, was not helpful as it was too complex and not “smart” enough to help identify the nuggets of gold that would drive their KPIs forward.
Simple Finance needed a platform that would mirror their values of simplicity and helpfulness, helping them to analyze feedback in real-time and generate insights in a way that was easy to act upon.
After carefully considering multiple vendors, Simple Finance took Lumoa into use as its main CX management platform. Onboarding went smoothly and Lumoa’s customer success team helped them set up the integrations between their surveying platform and Salesforce, their CRM platform. During onboarding, it became obvious how easy it was for them to get insights from all their text responses. Additionally, Lumoa was very accurate. With other tools that they tried they often struggled with false positives, as competitor platforms didn’t always consider the context of the response.
Simple Finance started using Lumoa to analyze both historical and new data. As they got more familiar with the tool, they created a routine where data was refreshed on a monthly basis so they could review the analytics results from the previous month. The most significant achievements which have been made possible through using Lumoa are:
1. Improving the performance of individual agents
2. Ensuring vendors deliver around the Simple Finance promise
3. Transforming ways of working
“Customer service team managers and I use Lumoa to review results together every month”, says Justin Go, Senior Manager of Customer Operations at Simple Finance.
While Justin looks at the insights on a higher level, focusing on more strategic actions, team managers look at the performance of the individual agents in their teams. As an example, managers used Lumoa’s simple search functionality to find feedback related to specific topics. From there, they reviewed these special cases with their team members to help them improve their performance.
Simple Finance outsources part of their support, so they have both “in-house” and outsourced service support agents. Customers don’t care who is employing an agent, they just want their issues to be solved and Simple Finance heavily focuses on ensuring that all the agents deliver great customer service, both in-house and outsourced.
Thanks to Lumoa, they found was that there was a 10-15 point gap in the performance level between their own agents and the outsourced ones. Furthermore, Lumoa showed that the outsourced agents were specifically underperforming in terms of service quality. As a result, they made sure that the outsourced agents got more training. “We gave our outsourced agents additional training around soft-skills. It was important for us to close the gap, to ensure that our brand reputation for having good customer service was not compromised” says Justin.
Justin adds; “Lumoa is really useful since you can easily look at the data in multiple ways. I segment the data and compare results on many different levels, for example, by manager, by team, by channel, etc. That makes it easy for me to find gaps and understand the differences in the scores”. Thanks to Lumoa, Simple Finance managed to improve their agent CSAT ratings from 77% to 82% during a short period of time.
Lumoa has also made it possible for Simple Finance to take a more experimental approach towards their customer feedback, helping them to find ways to improve their customer service.
Before Lumoa, Simple Finance treated their support cases on a first-in-first-out basis. This approach works well if you have enough agents working and if support cases are stable. However, when resources are limited (as they always are), this approach can lead to long case resolution times which in turn can lead to customer frustration and churn.
Thanks to Lumoa, Simple Finance realized that their “speed to response” was low when customers were asking for new credit cards. “When customers need to set-up new cards, they have to go through customer support. Usually, these customers are in a hurry, because our card may be the only card that they have and, as you can imagine, they need it as soon as possible to pay their bills and shop in stores. In this case, the first-in-first-out approach is not the best”, says Justin.
To solve the problem, Simple Finance tested a new way for case routing, so that card requests cases were prioritized. Now customers get their new cards 10 times faster (90% decrease in resolution time from 60hrs to around 5-6 hrs) which in turn led to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction. “If there is one big win that we’ve had with Lumoa, it is that we were able to find that particular problem so easily. We wouldn’t have been able to access those insights with any other tool without investing a lot of time and effort. With Lumoa, the problem was right in front of us, and it was just up to us to fix it”, says Justin.