What makes great customer service for a Fintech?
Customer service in a Fintech company with an incredibly international environment is daring and challenging at the same time. You are expected to adapt to different cultures, speak different languages and be super flexible. You need to get to know every single customer within a few clicks and next to this - you’ll need to act and react fast, accurately and of course make sure to give top notch service.
The way we deliver this at bunq is through our core principle of user-centred thinking. This means that we ask all of our bunqers how they think we can deliver the best products and services for our users. Our guides team is very much involved in finding out what’s going on in the users minds; in fact we’re the first to hear!
The value of a community platform
We are very proud of our online community Together, where users come together to share ideas that we can run through our product cycle and implement depending on popularity among users. To get our teams facing in a forward direction and ensure that they’re even more involved with our users, we encourage our bunqers to run the latest version of the bunq app and play with all the fun new features to get a better feel for things and be able to put themselves in the shoes of our users. Any company can guess what their users want, but to have first hand knowledge and live feedback is one of the many things that really matters to us when building an awesome bank that people love to use.
Every staff member should get closer to the user experience
At bunq we launched a program that we like to call the Chief Shift. Once a quarter every bunq employee (from outside the usual support team of course) takes their turn in joining the guide team’s support shift. Our bunqers need to come up with the answers to support issues themselves and learn more about the different branches of our product.
The Chief Shift has had a profound impact on our compliance team. While compliance are seens as the cops within bunq looking for the online scammers and keeping our users safe, it’s a breath of fresh air to speak to users who love bunq and genuinely love contributing within our community.
For our HR team, it was insightful for them to see the inner workings of the product and explaining certain app flows which they may not have come across in their daily functions.
Coders that notice issues that can be solved easily or our design team that comes up with a great idea to improve our app flow.
Don’t even get me started on our product team who are always excited to speak with our users itching to figure out the date of bunq’s next update (whenever it may be) or the next big user idea feature release!
The main lessons that we’ve learned as a company
The Chief Shift helped a lot of bunq employees to not only have a better understanding of what it’s like to work as a customer service agent, but also to understand how our users experience the app. With this, they can improve their day-to-day job even more.
All in all, we learned that getting other teams to join customer service is a great way to get different teams more involved with each other. We want to avoid teams that live on their own island and get them to interact more so they understand how their work contributes to the work of another team. It truly gives everyone the opportunity to have their say in making banking better. How would I describe that? Awesome.
