How HiPay boosted its customer satisfaction by more than 15 percentage points and eliminated its backlog thanks to Zendesk’s analytics tools

French payment service provider HiPay provides solutions for all payment issues experienced by electronic retailers. This technological assistance helps them with their internationalisation strategies, improves their success rates and reduces the risks connected with fraud. As a rapidly growing business, the e-payment specialist chose to use the Zendesk platform. This ticketing tool supports the company in its development and enables fluid interaction with customers.

Whether it’s Multibanco in Portugal or BanContact in Belgium, offering a country’s leading local payment method is now a must for any retailer that wants to grow in that territory and win a market share there. Unique and agile, HiPay is a global platform that supports these companies’ international omnichannel strategies. It allows them to aggregate the payments made by their customers, whose journeys may fluctuate between online and offline, depending on their needs.

The solutions developed by HiPay include a white-label product: “The checkout pages are totally integrated into the retailers’ websites and our brand name doesn’t appear anywhere. That way, the customer never leaves their payment journey,” explains Juan Abella, Director of Business Operations. The experience is not only transparent and fluid, but also secure, as HiPay includes vital anti-fraud protection. On their side, retailers benefit from gaining a complete overview of their customers: “A lot of information enabling them to understand how customers will behave can be fed back. That can be used to improve the conversion rate.”

Easier ticketing management

In April 2016, HiPay took second place in the FinTech category of the Top 500 published by FrenchWeb. It was a real milestone in their success story! Now in a phase of strong growth, the company needed to adopt tools that would measure up to their development challenges. They swapped their ageing ticketing solution for Zendesk, a scalable tool that was a perfect match for their marketing goals.

After initial testing by a handful of their agents, Zendesk was rolled out across the board. Very quickly, the old tickets were migrated to the new solution, which was fully deployed in just three months. So, what do staff like about it in particular? “It’s the ease of issuing the right tickets to the right people.” Especially as the solution communicates with other tools: “Twitter, Facebook… regardless of where a ticket is created, it can be found on the platform,” says Abella. Another huge advantage is that Zendesk is capable of integrating tools that staff already use and are familiar with, such as Slack and Jira.

Out of the various Zendesk tools, the people at HiPay make particular use of Zendesk Guide. This smart knowledge base, which is now queried around 8000 times a month, enables the agents to work even more efficiently. It includes around 300 highly tailored articles, which are written by an internal employee who is fully dedicated to the task, analysing the articles’ relevance every day in collaboration with the agents themselves. Maintaining this level of precision in the monitoring and quality of the articles has enabled HiPay not only to improve their customer satisfaction and reduce the number of incoming tickets, but also to improve their website’s SEO and ranking, resulting in a positive impact on the overall business. “The SEO power of the Zendesk platform enables our support articles to be ranked highly on Google. This means that many of our users can find the answer to their question for themselves, which reduces the workload for our staff,” says Emmanuel Chaumeau, Chief Marketing Officer at HiPay.

A year ago, HiPay also implemented Zendesk’s Answer Bot solution – a tool that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to respond to customers directly by suggesting the best articles from among the knowledge base content.

And the results are conclusive: around 40% fewer tickets (since 2017) despite an increase in traffic and business. “And the tickets are much better targeted now,” adds Juan.

The support team also uses Zendesk Explore. This software provides very precise measurements of customer satisfaction and highlights areas for improvement to follow up on by pointing out indicators such as the ticket response or resolution rate. The tool has already contributed to the creation of new habits in terms of the company’s management and oversight: “We share dashboards with the senior management every month. It’s become part of the company’s strategy,” says Abella. Explore is a powerful management tool, helping to monitor the agents’ day-to-day performance.

In addition, thanks to Explore, the support team has access to valuable KPIs such as the Next Reply Time. They can link these to the SLAs to get more precise data. “These figures give the agents transparency and a realistic view of what is going on,” adds Abella. And lastly, via the dashboards, they can also see which of the articles in Guide are viewed most often, as well as all of the searches carried out on Answer Bot. That way, the dedicated articles can be edited internally to be even more closely tailored and useful.

Customer satisfaction: 15-point increase in CSAT in 6 months!

HiPay’s main goal in adopting Zendesk and investing time in reorganising their processes was to improve their customer satisfaction. It definitely paid off! “In the space of 6 months, our CSAT went up by 15 points,” says Abella.

At the same time, Zendesk Explore enabled them to clear almost 100% of their ticket backlogs on major accounts. That was a big problem, which was totally eradicated by limiting the response time on tickets.

Now, the whole team is involved in improving the tools. The particularly comprehensive analytics tool has also helped employees monitor their own performance more accurately. “Thanks to Explore, it was very easy for us to organise challenges, and doing so has brought the teams closer together. Despite a few concerns at the start, the employees involved can see that the tool has really helped them. They have grasped it very well and are happy with it,” says Abella. Lastly, the HiPay team has been benefiting for about a year from support from the Zendesk Customer Success team as part of their Enterprise subscription. “This support has given us a lot guidance on areas for improvement. That has enabled us to make a big leap forward in how we use the tools and in our level of service as a whole.”

The next step: from early 2020, the company is planning to start using the Chat tool to assist their customers and qualified prospects in real time. The future looks bright!