The Broken World of Brand Empowered Customer Service

I had an issue with my Revolut account recently. A €10,000 transfer had gotten ‘stuck’ between the sending bank of Bank of Ireland and the receiving bank of Revolut.

The Magical €10,000 with Revolut

I had an issue with my Revolut account recently. A €10,000 transfer had gotten ‘stuck’ between the sending bank of Bank of Ireland and the receiving bank of Revolut. Revolut doesn’t offer a telephone customer service channel so I directed my queries to their chat service.

The customer service agent who initially dealt with my query was almost following a script and a set of rules. The core KPI they seemed to be chasing was how fast they could simply close my query not whether I was satisfied as a customer. My conversation bounced to a total of 9 different agents over a period of 4 days. I was constantly told it was the sending banks issue and if I wanted, they could force the transfer to be stopped but they didn’t know what would happen when I did this. I instructed them to stop the transfer and low and behold, the funds magically arrived.

I still feel that there might have been a cost on their end for stopping the transfer which is where the reluctance came from but I’m not sure.

The Undecided Policy at Stripe

We recently launched an app for a large airline to allow their crew members to order meals whilst traveling around the world. When building the app, we were asked who would be the best fit on the payments side. Instantly we recommended Stripe.

I know Stripe. I’ve witnessed the company grow from strength to strength through hard work, excellent strategy and exceptional talent. I’m one of their biggest advocates.

We launched our new app with Stripe powering payments over IBAN and card. When it came time to process the payments, we were flagged and blocked on the IBAN side within 5 payments. Yet again, like Revolut, Stripe doesn’t offer a telephone customer service channel so I directed my queries to their chat service.

In multiple conversations I was told;

• You have to wait until your account is in good standing with multiple payments successful before the block can be lifted.

• The block cannot be lifted.

• You have a limit of €10,000 on IBAN payments

• You have a limit on the number of IBAN payments

All disconnected policies and confused. I believe the conversation is outsourced to Telus. To resolved it quickly, I was bold, I went to a contact who is quite high up in Stripe and asked them to review this. Within a couple of emails, my account was back operational and all was well.

The Future

I understand it is an extremely difficult and challenging topic for companies of these sizes. How to you outsource customer service and empower the agents to truly fix and resolve the customers issues. This is a challenge I’m excited to solve.

As we continue to build Laila, I see two core north stars.

Brand

The experience should be on brand for the company. The tone, the personality, all the way through to the KPIs. If customer experience is a core driver for the company over task/issue resolution, lets make that happen.

I heard a great quote from Seth Godin. If Nike opened a hotel, you could easily visualise what it would be like. If Hyatt made a shoe, you would have no idea. This is the power of Brand.

Empowerment

The experience can only be as good as it’s capability to resolve your issue. If you tie the hands of the person trying to help you, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

In Laila, we are developing a range of integrations into the top providers but we will also work to build bespoke custom integrations for businesses.

Onwards!

Brian