GoHenry makes kids smart with money.
Find out how one fearless fintech doubled its customer base in two years.
Give an 11-year-old a debit card and they’ll feel like they can take on the world. Teach them how to use it responsibly and they really can take on the world. GoHenry is on a mission to make every kid smart with money. And what better way to learn than by doing it for themselves?
“Financial education should be accessible for everyone. Salesforce has been crucial to help us scale up and teach more kids to be money confident,” said Louise Hill, Co-Founder & COO of GoHenry.
The trailblazing fintech provides children aged 6 to 18 years with a prepaid, eco-friendly debit card linked to an app. Parents can top up the card, monitor spending, and set them tasks to earn their allowance, all from their smartphone.
Friends and family can also add funds using Giftlinks, and budding young philanthropists can donate to charity straight from the app. GoHenry also provides Money Missions, which are in-app gamified money lessons designed to promote better financial literacy.
By helping kids to get smarter with money, GoHenry is nurturing healthy financial habits that will last a lifetime. And that means a brighter future for everyone – as well as being more likely to earn more, save more, and have a more comfortable retirement. GoHenry kids are giving back to the community – including raising more than £350,000 for children’s charity NSPCC.
“Studies have shown that 60% of children leave school with no money management skills. We’ve all heard stories of kids racking up huge credit cards without realising in-game purchases cost real money, or thinking they’ve ordered a toy car until a flatbed truck pulls up outside, but the reality is the financial literacy gap is costing our economy billions of pounds,” said Louise.
And smarter money management is taking off. GoHenry doubled its member-base to over 2 million people across the UK and US in just two years without compromising on quality – after all, when your business involves money and children, the stakes are high.
In their own words...making kids smart with money.
Dare to fail on the pathway to success.
To keep people at the heart of the business as it scaled, GoHenry needed to unite its team with a common purpose. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for creativity.
The company’s ‘Little Red Book’ of values encourages staff to demand brilliance, be curious, appreciate feedback, and be brave. And Louise is a big believer in the power of daring to fail on the pathway to success.
But daring to fail takes guts. To empower its people to be confident and bold, the company puts a greater emphasis on choice – starting with where they work.
Slack acts as a digital HQ, meaning employees can be productive and collaborate from anywhere. During the pandemic, the team embraced change head-on, knowing they had real-time support from colleagues even if they couldn’t be together in person.
When David Smith, GoHenry’s Solutions Architect, was brought in to accelerate digital transformation, staff were confident that life was about to get better. David quickly swapped manual processes for guided workflows, freeing them up to bring their A-game to work.
From service to marketing, empowering the team to give customers their all remained front and centre throughout the transformation. For example, Lightning flows in Service Cloud send users on a guided journey to help log cases faster. GoHenry automated processes, centralised data, and gave staff the right tools to serve customers quickly and efficiently.
And to learn new skills and continuously improve how they use Salesforce, the team uses free online learning platform, Trailhead.
Great customer service – and then some!
GoHenry’s team of over 100 agents serve customers from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. They work in shifts to make sure they’re energised and ready to handle cases in the UK and US. Agents also have localised Knowledge articles to help them give consistently brilliant customer service.
Customers can connect with agents using their preferred channel – including email, phone, live chat, and social media – and Service Cloud centralises all communications into a single console. Via an integration with Social Studio, the team uses social listening to route comments on social channels directly to an agent for a speedy response.
The telephony system is also linked to Salesforce to give staff full visibility of who the caller is before they even pick up the phone, and if they need to escalate a case or collaborate with a colleague, they can do it without leaving the platform.
But, as you’d expect with a self-service product, there’s increasing demand for self-service support from customers as well. The team built a community FAQ to answer common queries, and set up AI-empowered chatbots to handle simple requests and route more complex cases to the most relevant free agent.
Empowering the team to take initiative.
With great technology and a bold team, GoHenry can go above and beyond for customers at an emotional time. In one case, that meant preventing a young teen’s first date from turning into a first disaster.
“One Valentine’s Day, an agent received a call from a teen who had gone on their first ever dinner date. When it was time to pay, one of our processing partners had a system error that meant their card wasn’t working, and the restaurant wasn’t set up to take payment over the phone,” recalled Louise.
Luckily, with 360-degree visibility in Service Cloud, the agent collaborated with the child, parent, and restaurant at the same time. In a situation that seemed hopeless, she took the initiative to use the restaurant’s online ordering service to process a payment using her company card, while keeping everyone up to date on the phone.
The secrets of scalability.
By adopting best practices and the right technology, doubling the customer base in just a couple of years was completely manageable. With sales, service, marketing, and internal collaboration centralised on Salesforce, GoHenry had everything it needed to grow rapidly while keeping customers at the heart of operations.
One of the most crucial components of scalability is 360-degree visibility of the customer. As GoHenry connects more data and processes in Salesforce, it’s breaking down silos and unlocking richer metrics across the entire organisation.
Dashboards are used to monitor performance and identify areas for improvement, and the product team captures feedback to identify and eliminate pain points with the app or customer experience.
Family first.
GoHenry was founded by parents for parents, and it has never lost that people-first mentality. When it came to growing the business, it actively sought out a community of like-minded people to accelerate success.
The most important members of this community are the parents and children who use GoHenry. Feedback and insights from real customers shape, not just the app, but the whole experience.
After every service interaction, a process called ‘legendary feedback’ is triggered in Salesforce. The customer is invited to review the interaction, and their feedback is passed directly to the agent they spoke to.
Customers are also consulted on what GoHenry could do better, and which new features they’d like to see.
The second part of the community is partners, like Salesforce, who share GoHenry’s ethos and aren’t afraid to try bold new things. In fact, David has not only worked both with and for Salesforce throughout his career, he also engaged Premier Success to widen the pool of experts working on optimising the platform to support growth.
Be bold, be brave, and inspire a generation.
As GoHenry takes responsible spending mainstream, it’s not just kids making smarter decisions. The trailblazing company is inspiring a whole generation to be bold, be curious, demand brilliance, and celebrate individuality.
Research today suggests that educating children about money will add £200 billion to the UK economy alone by 2050. In just a few short years, GoHenry could radically alter that prediction for the better. Not bad for an idea cooked up by parents watching their children’s Saturday afternoon kickaround.
“The world is our oyster, and the great thing about working with Salesforce is we know we have a trusted partner to take us there,” concluded Ruth Vero, Head of Operations at GoHenry.
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