Enabling Faster Customer Support Resolution Times for a Growing FinTech Business

Business Challenge

Expanding Customer Support to Keep Up with Business Demand

Our client, a Fintech software developer with commercial and individual customers, needed a strategic partner to help manage their customer support operations. As their product and service expanded, the company experienced a 190% surge in sales volume — and a commensurate surge in customer support requests.

They were also transitioning from chat-based customer support to email-based support and suffering a decline in customer satisfaction. Our client’s goal was to forecast the capacity and headcount needed for the next 24 months and establish performance metrics to measure efficiency and create accountability.

The client had previously worked with a business process outsourcer (BPO), but the client’s management team was spread thin trying to manage the BPO workforce. Moreover, our client felt that the BPO was more focused on quantity than quality of candidates and did not provide the flexibility or communication needed to support their growing business.

Our Solution

Building a Solid Internal Infrastructure of Customer Support Professionals to Streamline

The first step in addressing our client’s challenge was building the right team. To provide talent that aligned with our client’s values, we not only had to find experienced customer support professionals but had to screen them thoroughly to ensure a culture fit. Additionally, these roles were fully remote, and candidates had to be available to work weekend shifts.

Despite these unique requirements, Aston Carter recruited 12 customer support representatives within five days of our client’s request. Our recruiting agility created a three-week cushion between hiring these representatives and their start date, allowing time to procure and provide assets and ensure that these contractors were prepared and confident in performing their roles.

The remote nature of these customer support roles — combined with our client’s need for performance optimization — made oversight and support of these contractors critical, so hiring a client engagement manager (CEM) to oversee our remote customer support team would be critical to the project.

Although recruiting for this role was challenging due to the temporary nature of the assignment, we drew on our deep network of experienced professionals, bringing on a CEM who had tremendous success managing our contract customer support team on a prior engagement with another client.

The CEM was responsible for onboarding, orientation and ongoing performance management, coaching and development of our contractor team. They kept contractors engaged through weekly 1:1 meetings and a weekly all-team meeting to set goals and establish camaraderie.

To measure and drive performance within the program, during the initial three weeks of the partnership the CEM met with the client’s leadership team to establish reliable metrics and informative KPIs — including:

• Tickets answered per week
• Wait time median (average time a ticket sat in open status before a response from an agent)
• One-touch tickets (percentage of tickets answered in one interaction)
• Overall customer satisfaction score

The CEM also produced deliverables specified by our client and met with leadership regularly to communicate developments and provide visibility into performance dashboards.