Summary:
- There is a wealth of information within customer support channels. The best organizations leverage this data to drive product and service improvements.
- Customer experience operations teams are becoming essential for organizations as they build a data-driven approach to their customer and tooling strategy.
- Customer experience and product teams need to be connected, giving product visibility into customer feedback about quality, bugs, and usability.
We recently hosted a webinar on the evolving role of Customer Experience Operations within FinTech companies. Our Chief Customer Officer, Christian Barrera, hosted Bryan Socransky, Director of Financial Services Product Marketing at Zendesk, and Tony Rios, Head of Product Operations at Ramp. Below are three takeaways from the conversation.
#1 Empowered Customer Experience Operations Teams Drive Improvement Across the Organization
Customer experience operations is a growing function within FinTech organizations as they look for efficient ways to unlock the wealth of information within customer support data from various channels. As a result, there is a growing need for process management and trend reporting that turns customer experience operations teams into value drivers throughout the organization. Customer experience operations teams can surface data around customer pain points, trending issues, emerging topics, and automation opportunities. Organizations can leverage these insights to drive product development, marketing opportunities, and upsells, just to name a few.
At Ramp, Rios noted that they leveraged customer support data to identify bugs, usability issues, and product requests that drive the product roadmap. They turned customer experience operations into a highly efficient, empowered team within the organization.
#2 FinTech Customer Experience Operations Teams are Revenue Drivers
An efficient, empowered customer experience operations team is in the ideal position to become a revenue driver for their organization. In fintech, there is a clear correlation between customer satisfaction and spending, so customer support must be able to deliver excellent experiences. At Ramp, Rios noted that after three or four interactions with their agents, they saw an uptake in spending. By directly connecting with customers, agents can drive customer retention and upsell, which drives revenue.
To further empower customer experience operations, Socransky recommended that they measure and tag revenue-generating interactions within Zendesk, which should be leveraged by marketing, sales, and product teams.
#3 The Best Customer Experience Teams Look Like Product Teams
As the need for excellent customer experience increases, the operations team becomes a crucial part of a FinTech organization. The skillset required to build efficient workflows that drive technical and process strategy tends to mimic product management. Rios and Socrabsky noted that customer experience operations individuals need to be able to analyze data, create reports, and work cross-functionally across the organization. Rios also recommended that the entire customer experience needs to be productized. An effective team will use design thinking to prioritize customer needs and create the best customer support experience possible.
With a clear understanding of customer experience strategy, organizations can build tech stacks and teams that can turn it into reality.
Conclusion
We concluded the webinar by asking, "How do you continually identify opportunities for optimization after a FinTech reaches a certain level of scale?"
Rios answered that it all goes back to the data and the workflows FinTech has set up to measure and analyze the data coming from the customer support team. The customer experience operations team needs to be continuously incentivized to drive insights from their data.
At Lang, we help FinTech organizations like Ramp leverage their customer support data and turn the customer experience operations team into a revenue driver.
