Wise: Strengthening customer communication with Zendesk

Online money transfer service Wise is on a mission to make international money transfers cheap, fair and simple. Started by two Estonian friends, Taavet and Kristo, in 2011, the global technology company helps people move money around the world – whether that’s sending money to another country, spending money abroad, or making and receiving international business payments.

Since launching 10 years ago, the Wise movement has spread far and wide, and now has more than 10 million customers moving $6 billion every month. To ensure that it’s smooth sailing for these customers and their transactions, Wise employs over 2,200 people worldwide, spread across 14 offices.

The company partnered with Zendesk in 2019 to ensure that its customers continued to enjoy the best customer experience possible as the company grew, which has been crucial to its ongoing popularity and success.

“Wise’s company culture is based on four key values, one of which is CUSTOMER > Team > ego. As customers always come first and drive every decision we make, the whole customer experience is extremely important for us,” explains Ian Rynne, Head of Customer Support at Wise Tallinn. “We’re constantly improving our products and implementing new solutions to offer the best possible user experience.”

“We see Zendesk as a partner and a tool that will allow us to offer amazing human support in the most scalable way. Our goal is to ensure that our services need minimal management and that our support teams work closely with our product teams, to identify which updates we can offer, for an even better customer experience.”

Best in Class Communication

Wise’s customers are global, so the company’s support team is spread across its offices worldwide, helping customers in whichever time zone they might be. In Europe, specialists are based in Tallinn, Estonia, and in Budapest, Hungary, while the team in Tampa, USA looks after customers in the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific hub is based in Singapore. In addition to English, Wise also supports users in 11 other languages, and the website is available in all 12.

As Wise sees it, the goal of good communication is to build trust with customers, wherever they are, and to keep things simple for them. The company uses Zendesk Support to track, prioritise and solve customer queries via email, and Zendesk Guide to store its Help Centre articles and serve them at the right time to customers. Wise customers can also contact the company via phone and chat support, which are both integrated into the Zendesk platform.

“We know that timely communication is important to our users and we currently aim to provide a first email reply to 80% of customers within 15 hours,” explains Ian. “Meanwhile, Zendesk’s API integrations help our Customer Support agents to gain a faster overview of the context of a customer query when it comes in, enabling them to understand the issue more quickly and reply in a timely manner. For Wise clients, it means a faster solution to their problems and a smoother customer experience overall.”

Increasing Flexibility and Efficiency

Wise began searching for a new support product when it started to scale, as the business needed a higher degree of flexibility when it came to the number of automations it was managing. The company is happy to have now established a productive relationship with the Zendesk team, whereby it feels supported in implementing the smartest automation and efficiency solutions.

“For us, automation is mainly about making sure that we have the very latest information about a customer and their ticket readily available at the time the ticket is created” explains Ian. “That way, we can make sure it gets to the right agent on the right team.

“We’re also building automation into our processes to ensure that customers who will be best served by self-service are automatically routed to the correct place to get their problem solved in the fastest possible way,” he adds.

Gaining Insight to Improve Customer Service

Twice a year, Wise organises a team-wide Customer Challenge where people from all parts of the business join the Customer Support team for a day to talk to customers on the Zendesk platform. It’s a great opportunity to better understand their problems and to receive input directly from those using Wise’s services about which issues they should tackle next to improve customer experience.

“These challenges are truly inspiring for all participants and ensure that everyone, no matter where they sit within the business, keeps the customer front of mind. The Customer Challenge provides the perfect setting to gain really useful insights, directly from customers themselves,” explains Ian.

Looking to the Future

"Going forward, we’re hoping to shake things up even more with Zendesk - to adopt skills-based routing and native SLAs, among a range of other features.”Ian Rynne, Head of Customer Support at Wise
Adopting this customer-centric approach looks to be reaping rewards for the company, as in 2019 Wise was voted the second most recommended company among Britons, according to YouGov’s Brand Advocacy Rankings. With an advocacy score of 76.8 out of 100, scores of past and present customers polled confirmed they’d be happy to recommend the company to family, friends or colleagues.

“Going forward, we’re hoping to shake things up even more with Zendesk – to adopt skills-based routing and native SLAs, among a range of other features,” says Ian.

“We’re also building a customer ticket portal to further assure our customers that they’re in good hands, as well as an Interactive voice response tool that integrates with Zendesk using a third party service, to better serve customers on the phone.”