Zai scales global operations with Salesforce

Alex Grabe has been with CurrencyFair since its days as a ground-breaking start-up, organising money transfers using telephone and email. A decade later, he’s the Salesforce platform’s strongest advocate. But it was during these early days that one of the company’s key differentiators was forged – a passionate commitment to great customer service.

Grabe took the successful delivery of a service for a customer personally. He would get to know them as individuals and find out who they were sending money to and why – whether it was for a birthday, Christmas, or to contribute to the family budget. “We cared about them and their families, and they became like friends,” explained Grabe, now Associate Director and Senior Solutions Manager.

“I discovered what these payments mean to people, and how important it is that they can trust us. It’s not a transaction to them, it’s a connection to home, to family and friends. It doesn’t matter if they’re transferring £50 or £1 million; at that moment they need to know it’s arrived safely. That’s driven my approach to service ever since – make it personal, build a rapport, and let them know you care.”

As the personal approach produced more and more customers, Grabe understood the need for a technology platform that can deliver consistent, personal services at scale. The company selected Service Cloud, which provided structure and certainty by capturing the history of each interaction with the customer and enabling customer requests to be shared equally amongst the team and targeted to the person best placed to respond.

“Salesforce has been a key component in our ability to handle growth and scale,” explained Grabe. “With an omnichannel approach, we’re handling tens of thousands of customer requests a month and we’re capturing information in Salesforce from every email and every telephone call to inform our next conversation. Everything is connected in Salesforce, there’s no duplication, and everyone has the up-to-date picture. Customers don’t have to repeat themselves every time; we can proactively reach out to them to show that we care and want to help.”

Building on the success of Service Cloud, over the years CurrencyFair has steadily expanded its use of Salesforce. “Salesforce is so flexible,” explained Grabe. “Take the Knowledge product for example. We can publish articles quickly and easily to help customers self-serve 24/7, as well as inform the customer service team members of new developments that in turn help them in their interactions with customers.”

Einstein chatbots are helping customers to find answers to basic questions, by directing them to helpful articles to perform basic troubleshooting tasks. For example, the need to clear a cache is a common problem and might take four or five emails with a customer service agent to diagnose and resolve.

Instead, the chatbot makes suggestions and directs customers to relevant articles with simple instructions. It records each step of the conversation so that if the problem isn’t resolved, agents know exactly what has been tried which makes diagnosis much easier. “This is a simple but highly efficient service that’s a great help for customers, especially when they need instant assistance – like late at night, for example,” explained Grabe. “It saves time and money too. It’s an efficiency engine!”

Salesforce is also helping eliminate difficult to diagnose problems, such as identifying when a customer may be having difficulties logging into their accounts when abroad.

Resolving this issue could routinely take multiple emails, but Salesforce analysis now flags activity outside the customer’s home country. This enables an agent to intervene directly, calling the customer at a convenient time and recognising time zone differences. Solving this at source saves up to €60,000 each year in agent time.

“There’s a wealth of behavioural data and insights captured by Salesforce which is valuable to apply and make improvements throughout the business,” said Grabe.

Showing care for customers comes in many forms. Service Cloud is synched with Marketing Cloud, and all service touchpoints with customers can inform marketing communications activities. This enables relevant, personalised conversations, tailored to the needs of each recipient and timed to arrive at the most helpful time, such as a reminder about an upcoming payment date.