Eway builds community support for customers with Salesforce

Online payment gateway company eWAY has been announced as one of the first global companies to adopt Salesforce’s updated Community Cloud.

Since its beginning, eWAY has been communicating with customers through customer service platform Zendesk, which relied heavily on email correspondents, flagging tickets, and pushing jobs to customer service personnels.

However, there were overlaps in queries from customers, and jobs were not being directed to the right people.

Since implementing Community Cloud in November, which eWAY CEO Matt Bullock said was a matter of a three-step template setup without coding, the company has been able to deliver a more personalised and interactive, yet self-service customer experience.

As part of introducing the Community Cloud, eWAY has eliminated email support for customers to ensure that queries are routed to the right people.

“This was the big thing and scariest, but also the coolest. Because you could no longer get email support at eway.com.au, we drove adoption to use community. You’d think that would make our NPS (net promoter score) die, but because they were getting answers, it actually went the other way,” he said.

Bullock reported the net promoter score has improved from 48 percent to 63 percent.

“It’s about giving a better experience to the customer. We record NPS on every interaction, so however you touch us, we have to make sure you’re happy with it, and if you’re not, we have to fix it,” he said.

At the same time, eWAY managed to cut its total customer cases down by half, from 100 cases a day to 50. Bullock said Community Cloud deflected many of the common queries.

“So if someone came in and said, ‘I want to know about this’, or ‘Is this the answer?’, we’re now able to provide that in the community, and that’s why half of the questions have gone away because the customer is happy. The average time to close the case has gone from 21 hours to 1 hour 46 minutes,” Bullock said.

Bullock added that at the same time, internally staff have been freed up to work on other projects, resulting in customer service time to respond reducing from 65 minutes to 16 minutes.

“It changes our mind in the way we think. Collaboration is a really important part in the way that everyone works closer together. When you’re doing that job and the customer talks to you, they should talk to you because you’re the right person. For the rep that means they’re talking to people who are really happy because doing a customer care job can be tough,” he said.

To further drive results, eWAY has used Community Cloud to create a gamification-like experience for staff.

“We now have people competing on how many questions they answer, and who likes something, and where you post something, and how many people like it to show interaction. What that is doing is building that community back up. It’s not just about deflecting a case but building a community and have people talking,” Bullock said.