Improving Customer Support: Bringing You The Experience You Deserve
Being user-focused is at the heart of every decision we make at Binance. Find out how we’ve improved our customer support experience over the past few months to better serve you and ensure that you can always get reliable, timely support when you need it most.
Main Takeaways:
Over the past few months, to meet growing customer support requests, Binance has applied its user-focused approach to improving the way it serves users.
Binance overhauled its internal structure, bringing in some of its strongest leaders and teams to streamline and optimize customer support processes.
By improving turnaround times for hiring and onboarding, Binance was able to reduce time-to-train while simultaneously improving case resolution quality.
Key operational changes were made to better address user needs, with efforts focused on providing users with the fastest and highest quality support possible.
Binance will continue its ongoing efforts to deliver the most user-focused experience possible, with further improvements already in the pipeline.
Earlier this year, we talked openly about our issues scaling customer support to meet the needs of our users. We knew improvements were needed, and we committed to making key short and long term initiatives to improve user experiences for good, including onboarding more dedicated customer support agents, expanding self-service tools and rolling out an upgraded online chat system to solve user inquiries where possible, while directing other cases to our live agents.
During the past few months, we experienced a ten-fold increase in active user numbers, with a similar uptick in incoming customer support requests, which put additional strain on our customer support team and platform. We raced to identify and address the most glaring issues our users were facing.
To take on the challenge, we overhauled our internal structure, putting some of our strongest leaders and teams on the case to streamline and optimize all processes, including He Yi, Co-Founder of Binance.
As a result, we’ve managed to achieve some notable improvements over the past few months:
First Contact Resolution Rate: Improved by 25% since Jan 1, 2021
Average Support Response Time: Now only 1–2 minutes
Productivity Improvement: Live Agents are 35% more effective
Today, we’ve increased our support capacity and reduced overall turnaround times—but we’re not done yet. We’d like to take this opportunity to share more ways we are working to continuously provide our users a better support experience.
Hiring and Training
Scaling customer support is a complex initiative that involves more than just increasing headcount. At Binance, we see hiring as just the starting point. With our customer support team stretched thin in earlier months, it was evident that we needed to scale—and quickly too. Though headcount wasn’t the only area where we were falling short, customer support hiring was set as a top priority for our recruitment and HR teams.
At the same time, we needed to overhaul our training program to ensure all users receive quality service. In addition, we closely reviewed our organisation hierarchy to ensure teams were logically distributed, with all managers set up for success.
To improve overall training times, we revamped our existing training program and introduced a heavy emphasis on agent specialization. We’ll share more on that later—but by combining these two factors, we were able to vastly decrease training times while increasing agent productivity by 35%.
We streamlined the hiring process to identify and onboard talent more quickly, while delivering strong results:
Overall Hired-to-Onboarded Turnaround Times: Reduced by ~50%
Customer Support Team Growth: +40% in four months.
Operations and Scaling
Our top goal when it comes to customer support is to give users the highest quality and fastest support possible. We made all of our operational changes with this in mind.
First, we built an in-house customer service tool designed to enhance user experience and work efficiency. By continuously improving the tool, we’re now able to better track individual quality assurance performance to properly understand how our teams are working and performing.
As previously mentioned, agents are now assigned areas of expertise within the Binance and wider crypto ecosystem. Instead of being spread thin over a variety of issues and topics, agents work within a more refined scope, where they’re better able to practice their expertise. The end result is they can give better informed, faster responses—and when escalation is required, the path towards resolving the cases is more clear cut. By bringing this approach team-wide, we were able to provide better responses, faster than ever before.
We also kicked off additional team leader training to strengthen leadership and operational management skills. Each team then optimized their approach to scheduling to improve case volume management at peak times.
For more urgent or complex cases, we employ a dedicated team of experienced senior agents to guide and assist those with security related issues. When our users have pressing security concerns, our response needs to be quick, accurate and decisive.
On top of this, we’re proud to offer customer support in more than 14 languages. We have been expanding our round-the-clock service for new language lines to cater more inclusively to all users.
Analysis and Optimization
We work relentlessly to continually optimize our working processes and performance. Our support chat interactions provide a stream of actionable user insights: We analyze incoming chat topics, assess the frequency of inquiries and review other data points to create reports which lead to product and chat tool improvements. These improvements are deployed based on areas of need, which helps cut down on the number of incoming tickets.
When it comes to self-service tools and support content, we applied machine learning techniques to identify topics and optimize our tools, in order to increase case resolution speeds and reduce the need for users to connect to live agents in the first place.
We also reassed our team and individual targets to better cater to our users needs, and added incentive schemes to reward team members who are going the extra mile to help users. To measure our impact, we have enhanced our monitoring and increased the number of quality assurance analysts on our team.
Finally, we added efficient processes to help our support team, product teams and other departments shorten the investigation circle, further reducing waiting times and making it quicker to escalate cases. Teams also hold daily meetings to escalate tough cases, to ensure they don’t get lost, with key learnings shared with the wider team for next time.
Keeping the Improvements Coming
At Binance, we want to provide the most user-focused experience possible, a perpetual goal with no end in sight. We have many more customer service improvements in the pipeline, including further improvements to our training processes, updates to our quality assurance programs and additions to our internal knowledge databases. The journey doesn’t stop here—we can’t wait to share more updates with you soon!