Measuring Baseline CCX (Crypto Customer Experience)

In late 2016 I became interested in bitcoin, and thus blockchain technology. So much so that my then grade school understanding of smart contracts woo’d me into buying ether tokens (Ethereum).

But my expertise is not in cryptography or coding solidity. What I do understand is CX. So how do you measure CCX?

It starts with the exchanges — where we convert our fiat to digital currencies. Cryptocurrency exchanges have taken on thousands of new customers. As of late last year Coinbase alone was said to have over 13 milllion users.

Thus far my anecdotal observation is that customer experience from leading crypto exchanges is generally a poor one. This issue potentially gives new crypto investors a bad overall taste for blockchain technology. Especially when compared to other established gateways to traditional investments (E-Trade, Ameritrade, etc.).

But it is often difficult to separate the actual customer experience within an exchange’s control from a lack of general crypto knowledge.

For example, someone using the wrong wallet address and subsequently blaming the exchange. Or worse — falling for the rampant free cryptocurrency scams on twitter. As a result, I wanted to create something more tangible on the CCX provided by exchanges.

To compare the service of cryptocurrency exchanges to the rest of the service world I utilized the design and results of the 2018 Customer Service Benchmark Report compiled by CRM softare provider SuperOffice. You can download the full report here.

The report was overly simple, but still an effective measure of baseline customer experience. If companies cannot get these right, it is less likely they can handle more complex issues. In a similar manner to SuperOffice, I posed the following two questions to each of the listed cryptocurrency exchanges:

Do you have a phone number I can call you on?

Where can I find trading fee information on your website?

I then categorized the results into five key buckets (again similar to the benchmark report):

• Was receipt of my email acknowledged? (Yes/No)
• Did I receive a response to my question? (Yes/No)
• Was my question answered on the first reply? (Yes/No)
• Did I later receive a follow-up to check if I was happy with the response (ex, “Rate our service”)? (Yes/No)
• What was the average response time (ex, 5 hours)? (in hours)

Crypto exchanges excelled vs. other service organizations when it came to simply acknowledging your request. This can however be easily explained. Exchanges are new and most appear to be utilizing CRM technology like zendesk, desk.com, etc. All of these tools have easy to set up auto-replies. Coinbase did an exceptional job in the auto-reply by including links to answers of commonly asked questions. The only other exchange to do this was Kraken, although not as cleanly. Many traditional or small benchmark organizations have still not invested in quality CRMs, and thus their inability to get a mostly simple thing done.

On average crypto exchanges again did better than other service organizations when attempting to answer a question. This one did surprise me. With rapid growth also comes understaffing and service is usually the first to fail. This is a positive sign that exchanges are also in it for the long haul and investing not only in the product and price but the CX. Notably the score would have been 100% had Bithumb replied to the fee question (they just simply never did).

Again Crypto exchanges are outdoing traditional service companies. I think there is less to say here about crypto exchanges than there is to say about the poor overall ability for other service organizations to answer questions on their first attempt. Often this is the result of complexity which requires clarifying questions before attempting to answer. However its fair to say crypto is a complex topic to most new traders.

In general, service organizations and crypto exchanges are not ensuring customers have had their expectations met. Asking if a customer’s question was fully answered is important as many customers may receive a response they simply don’t understand, and thus they may give up. And subsequently take their business elsewhere. It is also difficult to improve resolution rates if you don’t get feedback.

Credit to Kraken, who later followed up to contact them with any further questions. Additionally the email appeared to come from an actual person (vs. automated or generic service inbox). Huobi also followed up but with an automated response.

Coinbase is also worth noting — although they did not send a seperate follow up email, they did include a CSAT rating below the signature of every response.

This particular method of collecting feedback (using smileys) is great as it is understood through most languages/cultures. It was also the only example of a company that appears to be collecting data in order to improve the CCX.

Response time from crypto exchanges was faster on average. The numbers represented above are also unfair in that several non-U.S. based exchanges have around a 12 hour difference and its safe to assume that most all do not have 24/7 customer support. If not for this the average response time for crypto exchanges would be even lower.

Coinbase and Bitstamp excelled in this case always responding within the hour if not minutes. Kraken also responded quickly although not consistently (once within minutes, but the second request took 12 hours).

Even if you just skimmed the charts you can quickly see that the baseline CCX is above the CX of most non-crpto related service organizations. The test itself is of course a minuscule sample of the real CCX but it does directionally support one thing — crypto exchanges are valuing the customer experience.

The responses from the non-U.S. based exchanges were typically abrupt or one word answers. They lacked that high touch feel some of us now want (even when our customer segment is less valuable). This can be expected as cultural differences in the value of CX vary significantly.

The best overall experiences came from two U.S. based exchanges — Coinbase and Kraken. Response were well thought out, and attempted “next issue avoidance” (or answer your next question). The responses also came from a person (or at least appeared too) rather than a generic inbox. This makes the experience feel more personable, as if you are working with someone vs. with a company.

Customer portals were required on 5 of the 8 exchanges. Bitfinex’s portal was very difficult to even find and use. I played around with Coinbase’s chatbot (named “Ada”) and it was quite useful. It was interesting to find some exchanges like Binance do not support phone inquiries. Despite feeling “old”, phone support is still the most likely avenue for customers to use when dealing with complex problems (although as a last resort).

In the end, this makes me feel better about crypto exchanges and their long term viability. It will take some time to accomplish a great CX as user rates continue to climb rapidly and along with that the customer challenges. But it will be exciting to see how things shake out over the next decade. Perhaps we will see Coinbase or Kraken in a future Customer Service Hall of Fame — discussed in my previous Medium post here.