At Mono, we pride ourselves on being a customer-first organization. This shapes everything we do, from providing support to our partners and end-users to ensuring that they are empowered with all the resources they need to use our products and grow as a business.
I lead the Partner Operations team at Mono, and our goal is to help our partners succeed with the use of our products and every interaction with us. In this article, I will be outlining how we are constantly scaling our support processes to provide effective, proactive, and reliable support to our customers. Here's how we do it:
1. Deliver self-serve support
We believe that the best support is to need no support. This means that the most effective way we can support our customers is by ensuring that once they interact with any of our products or API services, they can self-serve without requiring one-on-one support each time; and that the user experience remains seamless.
We're big on making the user experience clear and uncomplicated for all customers (partners or end-users), so, support starts right from the product development and engineering stage. Here's how this works:
We actually speak to our customers to find out how new features or products will impact their experience with our core products as a whole.
Next, we don’t just build these products, we ensure that the products we build are fast, user friendly, and simply work.
Finally, once the product is built, we ensure that we test them extensively in-house and with our partners to get more impactful feedback before the product is released so our partners can have the best possible experience when they use them.
Our work doesn't end after a product is built. We continuously iterate and make improvements to make our partners' experience with them better. This is why we have a Support feature on the Mono dashboard that encourages our partners to suggest any product improvements they would like to see.
Also, we reach out to our partners for questions they might have about anything we build and proactively provide answers to these questions before they are asked.
2. Provide highly engaged support when needed
While the best support is to need no support, we are always right there for our partners when they actually need us to provide some assistance. Yes, we work hard to build a great product and user experience, but for the most part, the next best support we provide is actual, prompt, and empathetic support. Here are a number of ways we achieve this:
We use the best support tools
We use Intercom's live chat feature to provide real-time support and respond to requests or queries from customers. Sometimes, customers want human support, live chat enables us to have a conversation with a customer, give quick answers to questions about our products, solve any problems they might have, and assure them that we're always there for them whenever they need us.
With live chat, we are able to drive retention and maintain customer loyalty. When customers see that their issues are listened to attentively and also resolved promptly, they tend to feel more connected to us as a company and also leave reviews that reflect this experience.
We also offer support to our partners via email. We ensure all emails in our inbox are responded to promptly and efficiently. Our current first response time is under 20 minutes and we resolve issues in under two hours.
To keep support highly personalized, we also use dedicated messaging channels for our partners on Slack, to give them one more useful channel to connect with us and speak to the support team whenever they need to.
We automate where we can
I know that live chat is a very convenient option when you need to have a one-on-one interaction with a customer, but sometimes questions can get repetitive and there has to be a smarter way to resolve issues more efficiently and in less time.
For instance, at some point, we noticed that 60% of queries from end-users revolved around the same questions, like "how do I share my bank statement?" or "what is my username and password?" So, we thought of using automated support bots to triage incoming requests of this nature and also speed up resolution times.
The bots were built with the end-user in mind so we had to make sure that it sounded conversational, and questions were answered clearly and in simple words. We’ve had end-users who don’t know they’re talking to a bot, try to be friends with it after an issue resolution! The chatbots are also monitored and set up to ensure that during a conversation, they can also provide additional resources like FAQs answers for a more detailed response. And if an issue still can't be resolved, it is assigned to a real person on our team who immediately takes over the conversation.
With this approach, the way we run support has significantly improved. Today, the bots have a 90% completion rate, and we're able to resolve first-level end-user requests faster without cutting back on personalized, one-on-one support.
We maintain a resourceful knowledge base
The right information is power. With our knowledge base, we get to answer our partners' and end-users' questions in an organized manner. When a new feature or product is in the works, we consider every possible question anyone who interacts with it might have. This guides us to create questions and answer them simply and correctly. We also write how-to articles and create visual guides for our partners, to make our answers clearer and more accessible. Our knowledge base also includes a search feature that allows anyone to find an answer with words relevant to them; this also informs how we organize these support questions and answers.
As a product or feature changes and grows in nature, we work closely with our Product team to understand these changes and what they mean for our partners, take these changes into account, and update existing answers and visuals in the knowledge base. This helps our partners understand how each new feature works, to get the best use of them, and access up-to-date information always.
Customer Ratings and Surveys
Feedback is highly important to us, and after every conversation we have with our partners, we ask them to rate the conversation so we can understand how we’re doing and what we can do better. We take these ratings very seriously and use reviews to improve the quality of support we provide.
We also send out surveys to our partners to get their feedback on the support they are receiving and how our products make their work and the lives of their users better. This is integral to our product and support efforts.
Bottom line
Empathy is everything, and without it, support will feel out of touch. The most important way our team provides effective support is by being empathetic to our partners' needs and going the extra mile to ensure they are satisfied with the service they receive.
If you ever need support from our team, you can always reach out to us at support@mono.co, we'll be happy to help.
New to Mono?
You can sign up to access our open banking APIs and no-code tools for financial data and bank transfer payments. If you'd like to speak to our Sales team to better understand how Mono can help your business, leave us a message at sales@mono.co.
