Customers
20M
Tickets/Month
300K
Partner Merchants
70K
Industry
Financial Services
Products Used
Philippines leading e-wallet provider, GCash, works with Zendesk to provide superior experience to 20 million customers.
When it comes to choosing a financial services provider, few things are more important to a customer than trust. Everyone wants to be confident that not only will their money be safe and easy to access, but that the business entrusted with those funds will be there when they need help, whether itās for a simple password reset or something more complex.
Building and nurturing customer trust
For GCash the leading e-wallet solution in the Philippines, building and nurturing that trust means being ready 24/7 to help its over 20 million customers as well as over 70,000 partner merchants across the country. And with the need to manage 300,000 tickets each month in both Filipino and Englishāacross help center, chat, phone, and email channelsāGCash understands that providing excellent customer service is absolutely crucial to its business.
āWhat we provide for our customers is really very important, because itās their money entrusted to our system,ā said Joanne Avendano, GCashās vice president of customer experience. āWe have to provide not just a stable platform, but an experience and a support structure where they can really rely on us. So knowing that someone is there when they need help is important in the product that we serve.ā
GCashās support faces growing pains
Avendano has been with GCash since its launch in 2004 as a mobile payment and remittance service from Globe Telecom, the largest mobile network operator in the Philippines. In the past six years, GCash has grown from a simple way to send money to more of a lifestyle app, and that change has led to enormous growth in users and the resulting demand for customer service.
As the head of customer experience, itās up to Avendano to make sure that each interaction is as seamless as possible. And as GCashās reach has expanded, āit evolved into not just providing that technology, but also how to actually utilize technology to give a better experience for customers,ā she said.
As the user base grew and customers reached out for support via phone, email, and chat, the lack of integration across platforms and self-service options became a friction point in the customer experience. āThe challenge [we faced] was the difference between messaging and live chat,ā said Avendano. āSo customers would send a message and they wouldnāt know when the response would be.ā With the companyās very rapid growth, response times started to hover around 24 hours, a trend GCash knew would have detrimental effects on customer satisfaction, namelyĀ CSAT.
The search for a solution leads to Zendesk
In 2017, GCash began exploring ways to integrate its support channels and prepare for future growth by looking at Freshworks and Salesforce, but once Avendano tried Zendesk, she knew sheād found the right partner for security, service, and flexibility. āThere was one very important criteria at the time and that was security,ā says Avendano. āBecause we are dealing with financial services, compliance to our card security became the number one priority for us. And only Zendesk could provide that at that time.ā
Since first deployingĀ Zendesk SupportĀ in 2018 and discovering its strengths, GCash has also addedĀ Talk,Ā Chat, andĀ Guide. āWe are discovering so much about Zendesk,ā Avendano said. āNot just its ability to provide us with a structured way of doing things, but also with the capabilities that weāre benefitting from right now. So much fits into what we wanted and needed to work for us.ā
After GCash began using Chat (which it will embed in its app via ZendeskāsĀ mobile SDK), it quickly saw overall response time numbers drop from 24 hours to two hours, and with live chatāwhich accounts for 25 percent of messagingāit is now a mere 26 seconds. āChat has given us an ability to engage in real time with a customer where the customer also knows that, āHey, thereās really someone right now whoās talking to me,āā Avendano said. āSo our response times have grown significantly since we launched Chat.ā
GCash helps customers help themselves
GCash fields about 500 agents, with roughly 70 percent dedicated to chat and messaging channels and 30 percent answering requests via Talk. That team has in turn used Zendesk to capture data about customer needs, which revealed that about 30 percent of the 10,000 daily tickets were for common issues.
By using Guide to provide self-service content, agents can spend more time on issues that require a human touch. GCashās knowledge base empowers customers and agents, leading to better customer satisfaction rates, due in no small part to Guide enabling the support team to quickly update articles with the latest information. And importantly, itās led to greater efficiency. āThe moment we launched Help Center in the app, weāve been able to deflect up to 90 percent of our how-to concerns to self service,ā said Avendano.
Meanwhile, GCash has found ChatāsĀ Side ConversationsĀ module essential for successfully escalating tickets. This behind-the-scenes capability enables GCashās support network to pass along essential information from the initial point of contact with an agent to the deeper abilities of a specialist who can help with tech or financial support. Reporting tools within Side Conversations allows GCash to properly track tickets and keep updated on the status of a customer interaction.
Using data to create a better customer experience
On a daily basis, Avendano uses Zendeskās reporting tools to track important CSAT insights. āEvery day when I come in, thatās the first thing that I log onto,ā she said. āI log onto the reports immediately, and thatās where I track where each of the tickets are and whether the team has been meeting its targets or not. We use that quite a lot.ā In this daily flyover of the dayās tickets, she tracks several metrics, starting with response time, followed by the average resolution time, and the customer effortāwhich is the number of times the customer has to follow-up on a ticket.
Part of GCashās success with Zendeskās tools is the platform it provides, but itās also the companyās ability to maximize the use of the tools. Avendano said that many of the gains came from internal process improvements, but that partnering with Zendeskās local success partner has also played a significant role in GCashās progress. āEven though we have Zendesk, if we donāt know how to use it, then itās really nothing,ā said Avendano. āThe strong collaboration with the local success partner assigned to work with us has allowed us to fastrack full use of its capabilities.ā
Being able to provide an omnichannel experience for customers also allows GCash to see a customerās history of interactions with support. āHaving it all in one place, authenticated and put together, is very, very important to us, so that we donāt break the experience that we have with the customer,ā Avendano said.
The combination of data, self-service, and greater visibility of the customer journey will lead to greater agent efficiency over time, Avendano said, giving GCash the ability to smartly scale its support operations. āIāll be needing less agents over time, because Iām making some use of their time much much better,ā Avendano said. āWeāre trying to evolve customer service into a very digital and self-exploratory, self-serving solution. In fact, if you think about it, no service is maybe the best service. Maybe five years from now, we wonāt need the agents, because with Zendesk in the backend and the app in the front end, all the insights we have will allow customers to just self-serve themselves. And that is the ultimate goal, to provide less friction for our customers.ā
