Nubank empowers the customer experience team to create “WoW” service

Brazilian financial technology company Nubank launched in 2013 to redefine people’s relationship with money through simple, mobile-first banking and credit card services. In just six years, it has become the largest online bank in the western world. And its secret? Obsessing over the customer experience with easy-to-understand financial services, intuitive applications, and exceptional customer service.

For Brazilians, banking has historically been challenging. Despite having the world’s ninth largest economy, more than 55 million Brazilians do not have access to a bank. For those that do, the customer experience generally includes high fees, complex terms of service, and bank branches flanked by armed guards. There’s also an expectation that help may involve a long wait.

“Going into a bank branch in Brazil can be an ordeal,” said Dennis Wang, vice president of Operations at Nubank. “We set out to create a different kind of experience. Our core purpose is to fight complexity and empower customers. We want to give people everything they need to have a great relationship with their money.”

Many of Nubank’s customers are using a credit card or bank for the first time, so the company focuses on easy-to-understand products and services, like its trademark Purple credit card, which users manage entirely through a mobile app. The company doesn’t charge customers annual fees, or pay-per-use fees that are common among traditional Brazilian banks. Terms of service are transparent and upfront. Most importantly, they offer human-centric customer service.

Challenging traditional financial institutions and focusing on a simple, streamlined banking experience has made Nubank one of the fastest-growing companies in Latin America. In the last two years, it has expanded from two million customers to more than ten million. The company continues to grow based, almost exclusively, on word of mouth. In fact, more than 80 percent of Nubank customers would refer the company to other users. The team carefully monitors this metric, also known as a Net Promoter Score, which they call “Member Get Member.”

Given the importance of meeting its customer experience KPIs, it’s no surprise that Nubank invests heavily in delivering exceptional customer service and support. Of the company’s 1,700 employees, more than half are customer service agents—or Xpeers, as they’re called. Their goal isn’t just solving customer problems, but creating what the company calls “WoW” moments with customers.

“A ‘WoW moment’ is when our agents go off script. We want to empathise with our customers and make a real connection, whether that’s solving a particularly complex problem, or just having a really nice conversation,” said Wang. “Agents can send customers a gift or handwritten note to follow up. They can decorate the box however they want and send it directly to customers.”

WoW moments have strengthened the company’s connection with its users by exceeding customers’ expectations. They are a core part of Nubank’s culture: agents have created more than 6,000 of these moments with customers in the past five years.

The ability to deliver WoW moments for customers begins with the Nubank app itself. Customers can solve the most common problems right in the app. This self-service model lets customers take care of everything from paying a bill or raising their credit limit to alerting Nubank when they’ll be traveling abroad to avoid service interruptions.

While more than 80 percent of customers are able to find self-service solutions within the Nubank app, the company also supports more than 400,000 support tickets a month, with customer issues that are escalated to customer service representatives.

For customers who need to contact an agent, Nubank offers email, live chat, phone, social media and FAQ support. Nubank uses a spectrum of solutions to power this customer experience, including an in-house chat solution, a third-party vendor for phone support, and Zendesk Support for email and social media.

Nubank started using Support in 2014 as a ticketing system for email that interoperated with its mix of solutions. The company has subsequently added more functionality as it’s grown and scaled.

Nubank now also uses Zendesk APIs to help give service agents a holistic view of each customer’s history and to connect data from the various support channels, along with a support library of commonly asked questions. Zendesk collects this information, then Nubank filters it into a custom backend view for agents.

“Zendesk enables us to empower our agents and reduce response time,” Wang said. “We use the Zendesk API to connect all these different systems and provide our agents with views into what customers are doing and what they need help with. This system allows us to be truly customer-centric in our approach to support.”

This holistic view into each customer’s experience is one of the company’s most powerful ways to empower agents to create Wow moments with customers.

“Zendesk empowers our Xpeers to do great work,” Wang said. “It helps us hear and interact with our customers so we can relate to them, and use their feedback to provide the best financial products, apps, and support for our customers.”

Nubank’s commitment to empathetic customer support has helped it to maintain exceptionally high levels of customer satisfaction during periods of explosive growth, according to Wang. “Our focus on human interaction and customer support has helped us maintain Net Promoter Scores above 85, even as we’ve grown from 10,000 users to more than ten million,” he said.

Next up, Nubank plans to expand into new markets, including Argentina and Mexico, where it will bring its customer-centric vision for banking to tens of millions of new customers—creating more WoW moments for all.