To a cryptocurrency exchange, customers are everything
By Andre Pemmelaar, Quoine Chief Trading Officer
When Jeff Bezos was asked what the future would look like, what’s coming down the tech pipeline, he would often tell people that what mattered to him was not what was going to change in the future, but actually what was not going to change.
When he was first building Amazon, the factors that weren’t going to change were the most important — they required the focus. People wanted low prices five years ago and they are going to want them again in five years. They want quick delivery. They want a wide selection of products. These are all stable desires and they will not change.
Thinking like this has helped us at Quoine to target our work to ensure that we are focusing on what our customers needed in the past and what they are going to continue to need in the future. If we can provide this, we are winning.
Over the past week or so we have been looking through the list of things we have to roll out for the Liquid launch, and I have been asking myself the same questions as Jeff Bezos. What do our customers want, and what will they continue to want?
What our customers want
Smooth onboarding
When customers cannot get on board we are harming our future liquidity. We know that people want a smooth onboarding process. This is very important to customers. As we roll out Liquid we are going to be increasing our marketing. It is imperative that we ensure our onboarding process is easy and seamless so new users can flow right into Liquid.
Improved KYC policy
We are improving our KYC policy, which should help nicely with onboarding. Jon Myers, our Head of Design, is also working tirelessly on the onboarding process in terms of design. We have the security team involved too — we are all working together to make sure new users will get into Liquid without a hitch.
Faster withdrawals
As for withdrawals, we hear you. Withdraws need to happen smoothly and more frequently. In the past, we were doing withdraws once a day. We have now moved to doing them twice a day, as we had promised to improve this process.
But there is a trade off here. Our current process is focused on keep customer funds safe. The challenge is in how to improve the current withdrawal process without compromising security. Internally there is a lot of work being done on how we can make the this happen and a lot of development around the wallet side of things to ensure we achieve maximum security. We are going to make sure our users can get their funds in and out in a timely manner. We are factoring all of this into our internal roadmap of what has to be done for the Liquid launch.
The customer experience
We want new people to come to Liquid excited, and have a good experience. If they get to the site and have a terrible experience, that is a fail on our end. User experience and user interface are two massive tasks.
A great example of this is the Lending app. It has been hidden in the background and available for certain customers. However, even with my 20+ years of financial experience I cannot just look at our Lending app and understand what’s going on. It needs a rework — and it’s getting one. Our design team are dedicated to providing the best UI/UX experience from launch. We really want Liquid to provide the ideal experience.
These improvements are actually being pushed out before Liquid too, onto our other exchanges. Our main goal is to ensure that when people arrive, they should be able to look at the page and figure out what is going on straight away, with no need for any help.
Strong support
Lastly, we have also been developing our customer support. The number of open tickets has been plummeting thanks to our customer champions. But we can do even better! As part of the Liquid launch we are looking to implement two things:
Intercom — a third party provider who will make it easier for customers to interact with support.
Enhanced customer tracking — we are implementing a system that tracks every step of our customers’ journey. The results will allow us to visualise where our customers are having a good time, and where they are struggling, allowing us to quickly prioritize and make the required changes.
For example, right now we understand that KYC is not as smooth as it could be, but we aren’t too sure where the majority of our customers are facing issues. With these new tracking measures in place we will be able to tell where we need to point our development team.
A lot of our focus is on the web UI, so this will help us know if there are problems with a certain aspects, or if our users are loving the web app but having trouble with a part of the mobile app. Our customer journey is massively important and it is going to help us keep a mobile development process, tackling the problems that our customers are having.
A message for the community
As a final note, I would like to address the community. I have been reading the comments from you, and I know that some of you were expecting Liquid sooner, and you are disappointed that we haven’t delivered yet.
To those people, I can say with great confidence that we are very close to delivering. Although we are delivering behind the roadmap date, we are miles ahead of the majority of crypto projects. Maybe 95% of projects don’t make it out of the door. I can guarantee that we are getting out of this door, very soon. I am extremely proud of what we are going to do.
At Quoine, we are focussed on getting all of the features that are expected from a top-tier exchange running properly. We are striving for peak performance, but it takes a lot of work and determination. I won’t give you an exact date until we are within two weeks of launch. It’s better for all of us. But I can say that that date is coming very soon!
