Global money firm Paysend matches agent quality and efficiency with Zendesk
Sending money across borders is more than a financial transaction. It's an emotional one, too. That's why Paysend aims to make it fast, easy, and secure for millions of customers around the world. During its growth, Zendesk has been there to help the company to deliver exceptional customer support.
“Because we can now deflect tickets, our volume of tickets is three times lower than what it was before Zendesk.”
Svetlana Yumaguzina
Head of Customer Support at Paysend
“Before we migrated to Zendesk, we planned to reach the headcount of 100 people within customer support much faster than we actually did. In fact, we still haven’t reached that number, despite the business growing.”
Svetlana Yumaguzina
Head of Customer Support at Paysend
Founded
2017
Registered users
9 million
20%
Improvement in full resolution time, 2023
73%
CSAT
70-75%
Contact via Messaging
>$590k
Annual savings
Paysend connects customers to the world by levelling up CX for payments
For many people, particularly those who live and work in a different country to the one where they were born, the ability to send money is a direct connection to home that they never lose. Paysend is a global money transfer company that enables that bond to remain strong by allowing customers to send money from 49 countries and receive money in over 170 countries. The company has 8 million registered users who can send and receive money via card, bank account, and digital wallet.
“Despite being seven years old, we still maintain the ethos of a startup,” says Svetlana Yumaguzina, Head of Customer Support at Paysend. “We are developing and expanding to new geographies and we’re innovating with new products.”
One of Paysend’s new products is Paysend Libre, which enables unbanked customers to receive money online. Currently, 1.4 billion adults don’t have a bank account, which means there are a lot of people who could benefit from this service. But just as important as the existence of a service like this is the ease with which people can access it and gain customer support when they need it. Paysend now uses Zendesk to offer customer support to users across its product portfolio, which also includes a smaller segment of B2B customers.
Breaking the bottleneck
Before migrating to Zendesk, Paysend used a different system built by a developer on a platform not designed for CX applications. It was slow, had a steep learning curve, and didn’t have chat functionality built in, which meant the developer had to create another solution for that purpose as well. Add to this the fact that the old system didn’t allow the company to automate and it meant that every process was manual, laborious and time consuming.
“We wanted to innovate but every time we needed a new feature, we had to wait for the developer to have the time and resource to do something for us,” says Svetlana. “That was really slowing us down because the developer became the bottleneck.”
Paysend now uses Zendesk Suite Enterprise, Zendesk QA and Zendesk Talk. The transition to Zendesk has streamlined Paysend’s support processes, centralising the majority of customer interactions. What’s more, there’s less reliance on developers because now the agents, and indeed customers, have more autonomy to seek out their own solutions and answers to questions. Simple tasks such as rerouting tickets from one channel to another can now be done quickly by the team. There’s no more need for waiting around, which makes the team more efficient.
“We can now route tickets by language, product, or nature of request,” explains Svetlana. “This allows our customers to get to the right person immediately and they don’t need to be passed between agents to get there. Also, because we can now deflect tickets, our volume of tickets is three times lower than what it was before Zendesk.”
AI-driven QA pays dividends for Paysend
Paysend uses Zendesk QA, which uses AI to monitor and improve the quality of its service agents. The company’s approach to quality wasn’t always through a solution that was as straightforward, though.
“We were using Google Forms to support all agent evaluations. The process was super manual and because we were hiring intensively, we realised we needed to find a way to automate as much as possible. Searching through tickets took a lot of time and so did the feedback process. Once a form was completed, a QA specialist needed to reach out to the agent, provide the feedback and then have a back and forth with them on Slack. There were additional steps we knew we didn’t need.”
With Zendesk QA, Paysend can automatically analyse every interaction an agent has with customers and spots those who may need extra support. The AI-driven insights mean QA specialists can focus on specific needs, without spending time and resources on unnecessary training. And unlike Paysend’s previous solution, the evaluation process is much simpler. The feature has been crucial in maintaining high standards of customer service during Paysend's rapid growth and expansion.
In the past year alone, full resolution time has gone from over five hours to four hours. CSAT – a metric the company couldn’t even measure before using Zendesk – currently sits at 73 per cent.
Zendesk paves a sustainable path to growth
Paysend operates in a competitive space, yet the company is bullish in seeking areas of growth. Paysend’s digital-first platform helped it stand out from legacy competitors. Now, the company is targeting growth in Latin America, with Paysend Libre a particularly attractive option in the region.
Paysend has experienced significant growth, particularly in the last couple of months with a ramped up hiring strategy to support its expansion. However, thanks to the increased efficiency delivered through Zendesk, Paysend doesn’t have to hire as many people as they would have done on their previous CX solution.
Svetlana concluded, “Before we migrated to Zendesk, we planned to reach the headcount of 100 people within customer support much faster than we actually did. In fact, we still haven’t reached that number, despite the business growing. For our company, about 95 per cent of customers are individual consumers. For them it’s important that they are able to reach out to someone to find answers to their questions. We want to help them make successful transfers with us without thinking about doing it with anyone else.”
