Investing in Zendesk, Crosscard/VIABUY gains unprecedented value in just 10 months

Keeping track of expenses can be extremely challenging, not to mention time consuming. Seeing this gap in the fintech market, 15 years ago Luxembourg-based Crosscard launched its digital payment products. With prepaid cards and an online account, users can pay with their Crosscard or VIABUY Mastercard anytime, anywhere in real-time.

“Essentially, it’s an expense management solution. For our B2B customers, this means companies can easily issue prepaid cards to their employees. Expenses can be tracked in real-time, paper receipts easily scanned with an app and expense reports generated in minutes,” explains Sidd Hora, Sales Enablement Manager for Crosscord’s B2B business.

With VIABUY, Crosscard also offers products for the B2C sector. “For consumers, we issue e-money accounts with prepaid and debit cards to help them separate payments from their bank account. Think of it like banking services without a bank,” says Raul Docampo Álvarez, Head of Customer Service for Crosscard’s B2C business.

By 2017, Crosscard had already issued two million cards and the past few years has seen its customer base continue to grow. Operating in such a high-paced industry, both Crosscard and VIABUY have to be adaptable and agile. To help it do this and to best serve its customers, last year, it implemented Zendesk Support Suite Enterprise across both the B2B and B2C businesses.

Finding the right solution

Across the business, there are 20 agents in B2C and 10 agents in B2B dealing directly with customers. The aim is to deliver the best possible customer experience, and key to this is fast response times. However, Crosscard’s previous system did not enable the company to do this efficiently.

“When I joined the company in 2018, there were about seven different channels. It was complex for the agents to use with a lot of steps involved in responding to customers. We also couldn’t create automations to improve anything,” says Álvarez.

Following extensive due diligence, Zendesk was selected as the right customer support solution. “Compared to other solutions, Zendesk is more flexible, allows integrations and, importantly, all the tools can be accessed from one place,” says Hora.

Previously, customers would send an issue or query via email. This made up the majority of tickets, of which there are thousands per month. Instead, Crosscard wanted to use automation as much as possible and with Zendesk it could utilise the Knowledge Capture App to help customers quickly and easily find the answer themselves in the Help Centre. VIABUY also implemented Chat and Answer Bot, which uses machine learning to respond to customer questions with content from the knowledge base.

“For the B2B side, the key focus in implementing Zendesk was automations for SLAs and integrations. We wanted to be able to integrate Zendesk with other tools and apps,” says Hora.

Smooth implementation

You’d think a complete overhaul of its customer support solution would be time consuming and disruptive, however it was the complete opposite. Hora had the advantage of having had experience of using Zendesk in a previous role and so was already familiar with it. To get the rest of the support staff up to speed, he created training material using Zendesk’s own knowledge management system.

“Having implemented Zendesk in August 2020, we immediately migrated everything over, trained our team and started using it all within one week,” he states.

During this roll-out phase and since, Zendesk’s Customer Success Team has been on hand to offer any training, support, or guidance. “We’ve been very busy this past year and Zendesk has been very proactive coming up with ideas and offering support without us ever asking for help. So we got more than what we needed. It’s been a great partnership,” describes Álvarez.

The value of automation

A year down the line from implementation and the metrics speak for themselves. In both the B2C and B2B businesses, the main measurement of success is the first response times and following SLAs. Although the SLAs vary depending on the customer, in most cases it’s 2 hours for B2B and one working day for B2C. According to Hora, with Zendesk the support teams achieve these goals 90-95% of the time.

The value of implementing the Help Centre and Answer Bot has also been significant. It’s saved not only time but resources too. Answer Bot resolved 10,095 questions. Assuming without Answer Bot, 50% of the customers would get in touch with Crosscard, which would have led to an additional 5048 tickets.

Setting sights on the future

Ultimately, Zendesk enables Crosscard to provide even better customer service. “The added benefit is that Zendesk not only enables us to provide a good customer experience, but we are also able to use the data to improve our products. For example, every time an agent solves a ticket we get to know, in a graphical way, what issue or query the customer originally came to us with. We can then use that information to improve products and services going forward,” says Hora.

As Crosscard grows, so will its use of Zendesk. In the near future, the B2B business will leverage the Chat channel and is looking to work with Flow Builder for automations. “We will definitely expand our use of Zendesk. We can certainly see the benefits of integrating everything together in one system from Support to Guide and perhaps, going forward, even Sell,” concludes Hora.