Building a Customer Support Function in FinTech, for the First Time, During a Pandemic

Moves started operating in Canada in January 2020, providing low-fee financial products to gig workers in the USA. Think Lyft drivers, UberEats couriers, Instacart shoppers — an underserved market that has been long overlooked by traditional banks. I joined the small team shortly after we were founded, in June 2020. In a little over a year, I’ve built a Customer Support function from scratch, onboarded multiple interns and full time hires, and implemented a number of automation and customer self-servicing tools. My team has also responded to over 5,000 inquiries and tickets in two markets, all while maintaining a 96% customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. It’s been a process of continuous learning, trial and error, and intense adaptability. If you’re responsible for building a customer support function, this post will cover how I went about doing it, for the first time, remotely.

I’ve worked in customer-facing roles in the fintech industry for over 4 years, so working at Moves isn’t my first rodeo. But whereas in previous roles I was an individual contributor, here I’m the function lead, responsible for proactively identifying how we can better serve our customers, while staying up to date on industry best practices and tooling. I’ve outlined some of the things I’ve implemented and learned along the way.

Automation is Key

When I first started, many of our processes were manual — lots of tracking things in spreadsheets, writing out answers to questions one by one, manually inputting numbers and other info. To say it was time consuming would be an understatement! As we’ve grown, we’ve increasingly implemented more automated processes and tooling. This has the obvious benefits of reducing errors and responding to customers more quickly, while freeing up time for us to scale as our user base grows.

Teamwork makes the dream work, so in partnership with Product Operations, Product, and Engineering, a few things we’ve done towards automation are…

ZenDesk

When I first started in this role, we had been using Gmail to receive and reply to our members’ issues. I would frequently spend up to 3–4 hours a day “in the inbox,” replying to and tracking emails in a very manual way. I would document key words and email addresses from any important interactions in a spreadsheet I had so I could look back on the information when needed.

It soon became very clear I needed a better way to track emails and customer profiles, as well as a way to ask our customers for feedback so I could relay that feedback to other teams and improve my own skills (and relish in that sweet,sweet satisfaction of getting a high CSAT rating, too!). I was tasked with finding a customer support management (CSM) tool that met that criteria. Although my experience with Zendesk had been limited, what little experience I did have I remembered to be positive and intuitive, so that was the CSM we decided to go with.

Once we got Zendesk, it was up to me to figure out how to get us all up to speed on how to use it. After Googling and consuming hours of Zendesk tutorial videos and Help Center articles, I was able to get us up and running. Suddenly being “in the inbox” was no longer this daunting, manual task. I could track tickets, assign them, create automations and triggers, and implement the long awaited CSAT survey.

If you are also building a CS function from scratch, I highly recommend starting with getting a CSM/emailing software to help you do your job. Zendesk has been an absolute game changer. Since we were a young start-up, we were able to get a 6 month free trial to really test it and see how we felt about it. Another huge benefit of Zendesk is that the knowledge base (Help Center) lives right there on the platform. As someone who had to manually keep track of everything, in many different places, now that I have all the CSM tools I need in one place, my role feels exponentially less chaotic.

Financial Operations

With any fintech comes financial operations, which has also been a big part of my career in different roles in the last 4 years. Adjudication and verification are very important not only for economic reasons, but also for company security. We want to make sure we’re not losing too much money to fraudsters, but also want to make sure our database is virtually inaccessible to these bad actors as well.

Adjudication in a nutshell, is determining the amount (eg,cash advance) or product (eg, spending account in our case) an applicant is eligible for. Verification is determining if they are who they say they are.

Similar to the inbox, financial operations when I first started at Moves was an incredibly manual task (if not the most manual task I had in my early days with the company). Reviewing applications, supporting documents, and making decisions would take up just as much time as the inbox.

Unfortunately, this was something I didn’t have the same ability and autonomy to fix as I did with Zendesk. However, although I couldn’t fix much on my own, I was able to work collaboratively with other teams to work towards building automation processes for adjudication and verification. I improved my documentation skills, writing down each and every detail of my thought processes and actions so I could bring it back to our product and engineering teams to figure out how they could take the hours of manual work I do and turn it into an automated process.

If this sounds like something you’re struggling with, my best advice is this: collaborate and communicate! When I started working with the product and engineering teams to create the automation process, I came to realize that they weren’t even aware of some of the issues I was facing. Once I was able to communicate my biggest pain points and time sucks, they were able to use that information to build up our automation processes. I am exceptionally proud to say that adjudication now takes my team less than 2 hours throughout the span of an 8 hour work day.

Product Operations

While Zendesk was immensely helpful with helping my team and me organize tickets and set up processes around automating responses, I still needed some help automating all our tasks and reports outside of Zendesk. For example, our collections process. We needed a way to consistently reach out to our customers who were past due and encourage them to bring their accounts back into good standing. This is where Product Operations came in and saved the day! Before we had them, we were spending hours sending collections emails manually to our past due members everyday. Through hiring someone who specialized in automating these types of processes, Member Support had a huge burden lifted from our plates and hours saved by turning a very manual email process into an automated Braze campaign.

Member Support works very closely with our Product Operations team and they have been an invaluable resource to us as we’ve rapidly grown as a company and a team. I admit that it was tempting to be the “Jill of all trades’’ in my role, where I was trying to be responsible for absolutely everything, but once Product Operations came into the picture, it was clear that delegating some of our work to them was the best thing we could do to help the team work more efficiently. If you’re hesitant to give up some of your responsibilities but are also simultaneously struggling to keep up with them all, it might be time to bring in a Product Operations team to show you just how beneficial they can be. I realized through this experience that it truly is about quality over quantity as a manager.

Financial Compliance and Preventing Fraud

One of the most important aspects of financial operations is financial compliance and fraud prevention. Although I have a lot of experience in both those areas, on my own, doing everything manually, it can be next to impossible to actually keep track of all the potential frauds and red flags that come into our platform everyday.

In January 2021, Moves partnered with Unit, a banking-as-a-service platform, to help us navigate a complicated regulatory space in order to release our newest product, a Moves Spending Account. Thanks to our partnership with Unit and their KYC capabilities, we have significantly cut down on potential bad actors entering our system.

Of course, it isn’t foolproof, so it is imperative that we continue looking for ways to prevent any fraud on our end as well. In my time at Moves, I have created and implemented all of our verification rules and processes to best deter fraud. Between my keen eye (and background in private investigations) and Unit’s security features, I like to think we’re doing a pretty good job at keeping our company safe from fraudsters!

Being able to leverage Unit’s KYC and compliance processes has taught me how impactful product iterations and migrations can be on the overall experience. Without Unit, it’s likely my team and I would still have some very manual-heavy fraud prevention processes. Change is a good thing, even if it isn’t easy at first.

What Doesn’t Work?

I’ve covered a few things I’ve learned that have worked really well, but what about what doesn’t work? Every customer support department is different, but when it comes to issuing money and opening bank accounts, with a very small team, phone calls are just not realistic. We are serving a large community with a 3 person team, and phone calls can be the ultimate time suck. Although Moves doesn’t have a phone-in option, we do offer Live Chat 5 days a week, and emails that come into our inbox are always answered within 1 business day. I’m still in the process of figuring out the best ways to give our customers a way to contact us, while also not having my team completely overwhelmed by incoming emails or messages. As we continue to scale, I continue to review best practices and reach out to my peers in similar roles to ask what their thoughts are.

What do I need help with?

There is still lots of room for improvement. The things that keep me up at night are public ratings and reviews. Those go back to building trust. We have TrustPilot and Better Business Bureau reviews, but are those enough? What else could we do, what are we missing?

And when I think longer term, I’d like us to be even more automated and have an easy, intuitive, self-serve portal. Getting customers to self-serve (eg, read articles) instead of immediately sending a question or opening a ticket is a big lift, but saves us lots of time. Anyone who has experience with this, please reach out!

If you have an established function, I’d love to hear any tips from you about things I may not have considered. I’d also love to network with anyone in a similar role, and possibly get a working group going to share best practices — you can reach me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/franceyforster/.

Final Thoughts

While this has been one of the most challenging roles I’ve ever had, it has also been extremely rewarding, fulfilling, and an invaluable learning experience for me. If you’re someone who is just starting to build up this function, sadly, I don’t have all the answers. But, what I can offer are some words of encouragement: there is a reason you were picked for this role, and you probably worked very hard to get here. Believe in yourself! You don’t have to be perfect, but you can still be amazing at what you do and how you help your customers. Customer support is ever changing and always evolving. What might work for some might not work for others. What’s important is learning as much as you can wherever you can and leveraging what you’ve already learned in your past experiences to bring your customers an unforgettable experience. If you can learn the best ways to automate your processes, you’ll be set up for success. But be patient, automation cannot be implemented overnight.