Rupeek achieves the gold standard in stakeholder experience with Salesforce

Indian households are sitting on a treasure trove. They hold an estimated 25,000 tonnes of gold worth more than $1.4 trillion at current prices. The question is, how do we transform this enormous wealth – much of which lies idle in homes or bank lockers – into a productive asset?

Fintech firm Rupeek believes the answer lies in monetising gold by using it to solve consumers’ credit challenges.

“Fifty-six percent of Indian household debt is unsecured and, therefore, subject to higher interest rates and lower terms,” notes Sumit Maniyar, Founder & CEO, Rupeek. “Yet, 95% of household wealth lies in physical assets, including gold. If more Indians could unlock the potential of this gold as collateral for loans, imagine the kind of credit that could flow to the middle and bottom of the socio-economic pyramid.”

It is this vision that has inspired Rupeek to introduce one of India’s premier doorstep gold loan services – the first of many tech-enabled disruptions from the company that could change the future of gold monetisation in India. 

After clocking a three-year revenue growth of 7,295%, Rupeek was named India’s fastest growing technology company by Deloitte. Over 100,000 customers across 35+ Indian cities rely on Rupeek to fulfil their credit needs.

“Our aim is to monetise India’s gold for economic advancement,” says Anuj Sharma, Senior Director of Product Management, Rupeek. “We see Rupeek as a nation builder.”

Rupeek’s processes and customer interactions are all designed to ensure that customers feel confident entrusting their gold to the company. Agents pick up and release the gold right at the customer’s doorstep for their convenience. The gold is also stored at trusted partner banks to ensure safety. 

“We pride ourselves on delivering a secure, easy, and frictionless gold loan experience,” says Aditya Sriram, Head of Customer Experience, Rupeek. 

That experience continues beyond the loan origination phase, into post-disbursal when customers can request for their loan to be closed, renewed, or topped up. 

At this stage, there has to be seamless coordination across multiple Rupeek teams – including support teams which log and manage customer requests, back-office teams which track loan payments, and field operations teams which work with banks to release and return the customer’s gold.  

Previously, the teams relied on a mishmash of spreadsheets, CRMs, and ticketing tools. This siloed approach fragmented their view of customer data, making it difficult to coordinate and track post-disbursal activities – especially as the company’s growth accelerated.

“To scale fast, we needed to automate our workflows and improve team productivity,” recounts Sriram. “We also wanted to deliver smoother customer experiences – which meant integrating our processes, data, and pipelines. With Salesforce, we could do all that and more.”

“There are three things we love about Salesforce,” says Sharma. “One is that it provides rich out-of-the-box features, but can also be swiftly configured to emulate our complex business processes. Two is that it enables a complete 360-degree customer view. And three is that the Salesforce team is genuinely interested in finding holistic solutions to our challenges, rather than simply pitching their products.”

Using Salesforce Service Cloud, Rupeek has streamlined and automated post-disbursal processes. 

Customers can raise a service request or query either through the Rupeek self-service app, the call centre, emails, or – most recently – a chat feature enabled by Service Cloud. Data from these channels flows directly into Salesforce, giving teams a consolidated customer view to enable omni-channel service. 

“Even though our chat functionality is still at a pilot stage, 10%-12% of our customers are already resolving their queries through the tool,” says Sharma. 

All post-disbursal teams are unified on one platform, so that they can coordinate customer requests more easily. Any data they need is instantly available in a single source of truth.

“With the kind of workflows we’ve built, teams anywhere can log into a customer support ticket to track its status, monitor the turnaround time, and check that SLAs are being met,” says Anagha Suchitra, Product Manager, Rupeek. “These insights help us service customers faster and smarter.”

Previously, teams had to repeatedly call customers to collect their information and confirm their details. But with a unified customer view, the number of calls has reduced by 20%-30%.

“Agents can now process and close customer requests on a single call,” says Sriram. “This frees up their time to serve more customers.”  

With process optimisation comes efficiency. What used to take teams six hours to do, can now be completed in three hours – translating into a 50% improvement in productivity. 

“Teams on the ground are happier,” notes Sharma. “They can easily access data, track escalations, and smoothly hand over tickets from one department to the next.”

Adds Maniyar, “We’ve made Salesforce our stakeholder experience platform – the foundation on which our customers, employees, and business can thrive.”

Through rich reports and dashboards on Salesforce, Rupeek can monitor service processes at a granular level, and unlock opportunities for optimisation. 

“Our reporting and data tools are fantastic,” says Sriram. “Metrics we couldn’t capture earlier are now instantly available. Decision-making has also become more data-driven and effective.” 

Rupeek is now implementing Tableau Analytics to improve the accuracy of accounting.

“Balancing our books is a complex process because it involves various loans, back-end lenders, banks, accounts, and more,” says Sharma. “But with Tableau, it’s easier to reconcile credit and debit transactions. We can capture transactional data from various sources, transform it with just a few clicks, and store the final output in a data warehouse.”

Rupeek worked closely with Aethereus Consulting to optimise the Salesforce implementation. 

“Of all the partners we evaluated, Aethereus was the team that really understood our objectives,” recalls Sharma. “They also adapted very well to our fast pace as a startup. Together, we’ve created solutions, built out architecture, and solved complex challenges on Salesforce.”

Rupeek next wants to unify the entire customer journey on Salesforce – ranging from marketing and lead generation, to servicing and loan closure. The resulting 360-degree customer view will help teams deliver a truly connected and personalised experience across touchpoints. 

At a larger level, the company hopes to build more innovative products, diversify into other asset classes, integrate with larger balance sheet lenders, and extend their distribution network. 

“We want to build an entire economy around gold that will propel India’s growth in the next few decades. Technologies like Salesforce will help us execute that vision seamlessly,” says Sharma.