TrueLayer is on a mission to power a new era of financial innovation

Founded in 2016 with offices in London, Milan and Dublin, TrueLayer’s open banking platform empowers engineers, innovators and enterprises in every industry to build better financial experiences for their customers. Connected to major banks globally, TrueLayer’s open APIs allow these customers to securely and efficiently access their users’ bank accounts to share financial data, make instantaneous payments and validate their identity.

In this Fintech space, TrueLayer is differentiating itself with its developer-first approach. It puts the users who actually integrate its solution within its clients’ companies at the heart of the service it provides.

“Its developers who are actually going to integrate with our product and by servicing them as best we can, it means the onboarding process is as easy as possible for our client. For us, customer service combined with being developer-focused is very much in our DNA,” explains Chris Brogan, Head of Client Operations at TrueLayer.

Digital Focus

The customer service (CS) team consists of a mix of technical and non-technical staff members that equate to around 25 people, located across its three offices. This customer support is offered digitally through a variety of channels but does not include telephony.

“Digital transformation means stepping away from legacy tools, like phone. What’s more, the profile of the user we support – predominantly developers or engineers – would much rather send a ticket or chat than pick up the phone,” explains Brogan.

TrueLayer uses Zendesk tools to offer the best possible customer experience for these users and also for support in scaling the business. Zendesk’s ticketing system is in use, along with Zendesk Guide, which it uses to store FAQ articles and serve them at the right time to users. Chat support is also integrated into the Zendesk platform.

CS strategy during Covid

When lockdown hit in March 2020, unclear of what the future had in store, TrueLayer chose to focus on the tools it already had in place and upskilling its current team to support the move to remote working. By keeping open lines of communication while remote and focusing on the team’s wellbeing, this upskilling strategy was very successful.

“We operate in a very complex space and at the same time, the company is growing rapidly, adding new customers every week. Having upskilled all of our agents to be able to deal with complex CS cases has helped us immensely with scaling. We’re also very focused on the career development of our team as we believe this keeps everyone engaged in what they’re doing, so as to provide the best service. While being remote was certainly a challenge, the team has performed amazingly,” says Brogan

Providing the right support

While the customer service support channels were already in place, TrueLayer did add some additional processes and systems, such as building out its FAQ pages to support self-service for some of the tickets. “This approach meant that the tickets we did get through were for the more complex investigations and so we could focus the team’s time in the right places,” explains Brogan.

Tickets were also routed by implementing triggers and automations. This helped customers get the response they needed quickly and if they still wanted to reach out through a support channel they could do so via Slack. “We had a huge increase in the usage of Slack throughout Covid and even today it’s become our primary contact channel where we then create tickets into Zendesk for any deeper investigations,” says Brogan.

Single customer view

The Zendesk product that TrueLayer invested in as part of its customer service strategy at the start of lockdown, which proved to be extremely beneficial, was Zendesk Sunshine. Using this CRM platform, TrueLayer could connect all of its customer data in a single customer view, which ultimately helped with response rates.

“When I joined the company in 2019, the one-touch resolution rate was just 5% because we were constantly having to pull information from different parts of the business. Now that it’s all in one place, we not only save time in terms of full resolution, but we also achieve a really high one-touch ticket number each week of up to 40%. That’s really helped us scale,” says Brogan.

“In terms of day-to-day metrics, our first response time is averaging at 22 minutes. Combined with our one-touch resolution rate, this means we’re able to provide a really high-quality and timely response for our customers,” he adds.

Customer service pays off

“I love seeing our people grow whilst solving our customers' most pressing problems.”Chris Brogan, Head of Client Operations at TrueLayer Customers are more than satisfied with this level of service and TrueLayer regularly achieves a CSAT score of above 95%, which is a substantial increase from its score of 66% in 2019. “Our NPS (Net Promoter Score) score has also seen a huge jump. At the start of last year, before we put our CX strategy in place, we were hovering at around 15-20% and now we average 60% to 66%,” says Brogan.

As Head of Client Operations, these metrics make Brogan feel proud of what his team is achieving, and he puts this down to providing them not only with the right tools to do the job but career development opportunities to ensure they remain engaged and motivated. As he puts it, “I love seeing our people grow whilst solving our customers’ most pressing problems.”