How Scalapay uses Zendesk to scale its customer and seller support

As Italy’s first fintech, Scalapay introduced the country to Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). The Italian market leader offers a range of solutions that allow customers to buy now and pay later – interest free – for both in-store and online purchases.

Scalapay was founded in 2019 by Simone Mancini and Johnny Mitrevski, and is now one of the most common payment methods in Southern Europe. The company launched its BNPL service in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Belgium, The Netherlands and Austria in just two years and is now accepted in more than 5,000 outlets and online stores by more than 3,000 brands.

Scalapay not only allows retailers to increase their average revenues by up to 50% and basket conversions by more than 11%, but it also boasts a hugely impressive customer satisfaction score on Trustpilot.

“Making our customers happy is our main business objective. High customer satisfaction has translated to a lower dropout rate. 65% of shoppers return to the business or online store where they made a purchase with Scalapay within three months,” Paola Redaelli, Head of Service Experience, points out.

Customer service as the key to success

Modern customer service is about much more than simply providing support when problems arise. It’s a crucial success factor – both for store networks and the end customers who decide to buy now and pay later with Scalapay.

Positive reviews on Trustpilot show that these customers are indeed happy and a CSAT of more than 85% confirms the high level of customer satisfaction. Scalapay measures and monitors its CSAT in Zendesk, which is incredibly easy thanks to its powerful features. The team can also drill down into specific topics to gauge satisfaction levels in different areas. This makes it quick and easy to spot where changes are needed to improve the experience for both sellers and end customers.

Of course, sellers and consumers have very different needs, which is why Scalapay’s support department is split into two units. Consumer support focuses on managing payments and keeping customers up to date with support processes. Vendor support, on the other hand, is further split into commercial support (adding new services and optimising existing services) and technical first-level support. The latter is also essential to business continuity.
Out of 230 total employees, just 25 work in customer service at two different locations. They provide multilingual support in several languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and of course also English.

Scalapay’s most important support channel is undoubtedly email and operational support was originally processed in traditional email programs. This worked really well to begin with, but the company’s rapid growth soon laid bare the need for more powerful tools. The team opted for Zendesk because, as Paola Redaelli states: “Zendesk is a robust and reliable system that gives us the flexibility we need as we continue to grow rapidly.”

The advantages of a modular approach

Scalapay wanted to use Zendesk to control all of its operations – from initial contact with potential customers to managing internal processes.

Zendesk Support made it easy to manage emails and process corresponding tickets. The targeted use of ticket status and automatic answers in different languages ensure that no ticket gets overlooked. What’s more, the team were able to implement different views to optimise and adjust workflows. This ensures that “no customer reply goes to waste, even if the support agent isn’t about,” Paola says proudly.

Scalapay now has a complete view of every interaction with its customers, who in turn enjoy a seamless and consistent experience whenever they get in touch with the company.

Zendesk Guide, on the other hand, was hugely important in making self-service options available on the company’s website. The team used it to set up two support areas: one dedicated to customers and the other to sellers. Scalapay users can now find the information they need themselves – quickly and easily. But human support is always just a click away thanks to integrated contact forms.

Efficient self-service solutions are proving increasingly popular with customers, who ultimately value round-the-clock availability and zero wait time. In fact, Paola Redaelli reports that “the number of customers who get in touch after using our self-service features has fallen by more than 20%.”

Scalapay is now also generating useful reports to help it optimise workflows and realise the full potential of Zendesk Explore. This is good for both the company and its customers. For example, if the team notices a drop in satisfaction in a certain area, they can react quickly with improvement measures thanks to rapid analysis. On top of that, Redaelli points out that “we also created dashboards for other departments with light agents, so they can react to the queries and needs of both customers and sellers on specific topics independently.”

Evaluating and presenting information and data have become part of the team’s analysis, segmentation and reporting activities. This not only allows Scalapay to develop individual measures, but also meet the expectations of different stakeholders within and out of the company.

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The importance of modern technological solutions

Technology plays an important role in nearly every organisation. But it’s vital that solutions adapt to business needs, not the other way around.

“We chose Zendesk because we were looking for a reliable partner that would allow us to act quickly and flexibly. It’s not easy to find all of that with a single provider.”Paola Redaelli, Head of Service Experience at ScalapayPaola Redaelli is delighted because “Zendesk’s flexibility allows us to change rules with just a few clicks and adjust even the most complex business process in next to no time.”. She even goes on to mention a specific example: “When we wanted to separate end customer and seller support, we managed to create an appropriate structure with Zendesk in just a few hours.”

Zendesk also boasts a huge range of free and paid apps that can help companies streamline their workflows – a real plus for flexible organisations like Scalapay. Paola Redaelli has a great example of this too: “We started with all end customer and seller contact going through a single email address. After splitting email inboxes and contact forms (and all processes on Zendesk), some sellers would still send messages to our old email address but we wanted to reply from the new email address. Fortunately, we were able to find the perfect solution with just a quick search in the Zendesk App Marketplace.”

Zendesk Community is another great source of knowledge, with helpful articles and posts on all kinds of topics, not to mention tonnes of great suggestions on how to solve new challenges and improve existing processes.

Flexibility and the right resources are essential ingredients in any modern and efficient solution – even when it comes to integrating third-party solutions that companies are already using. But Scalapay was in safe hands with Zendesk, integrating both its internal collaboration tool and the solution it uses to manage multilingual support. Agents can now open tickets within the collaboration platform they already use and monitor everything in real time on Zendesk. This reduces the time they spend searching and ultimately improves the whole process.

For Scalapay to continue growing in the future though, it will need to keep developing its technological processes and systems, e. g. optimising how it collects specific information from customers, including their reasons for getting in touch, to better understand the motivations behind each interaction. It’s no surprise then that the team are already leveraging other Zendesk features like dynamic forms.

Integrating Zendesk with existing internal systems has improved both the speed and quality of the support provided, as customer profiles, purchases and history are all available in Zendesk.

Focusing on the customer and maximising the potential of Zendesk remain key growth drivers for the company. It’s no coincidence that Paola Redaelli says: “We chose Zendesk because we were looking for a reliable partner that would allow us to act quickly and flexibly. It’s not easy to find all of that with a single provider.”