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Monese embraces Zendesk AI to build on efficiency savings

Digital mobile money app Monese is seeing significant efficiency savings from the early adoption of Zendesk Advanced AI across its customer service and operations departments. With 15% of all emails fully resolved by bot with the first reply, and an overall 78% one-touch resolution rate.

Monese
“We can have multiple teams dealing with one problem very quickly. We’re consolidating teams. All these teams are using Zendesk and my gut tells me we’ll be saving money taking this approach because it’s all about capacity management and fewer tasks. Fewer processes lead to cost savings.”

Stephen Chang

Chief Operating Officer at Monese

“What I love most about Zendesk is the set-up. We’re a fast-paced business and we don’t have months and months to set up solutions. Advanced AI is ready out-of-the-box and works for a financial services model. You just plug it in, set up flows and go. And you don’t have to worry about training from day one.”

Daniel Wright

VP of Customer Service at Monese

Company Headquarters

London, UK

Countries Served

32

Agents

300+

Company founded

2015

30%

Containment rate with Zendesk bots

< 4 mins

Messaging response time

31.5%

CSAT increase since January 2021

82%

Time savings with Tymeshift

In just eight years, the digital-first inclusive mobile money app Monese has expanded into 32 countries across Europe. Its mobile offering attracts digitally savvy customers who also expect a slick experience when it comes to customer service. Alongside this, its own tech stack is making waves in the fintech world, with tier-one global banks looking to Monese for digital assistance which has led the provider to begin outsourcing its tech as a B2B2C solution.

With its digital-first retail banking model and its fledgling XYB technology offering, Monese must align itself with the most cutting-edge third-party solutions – which means looking at the power of AI within its business.

Monese switched from Freshdesk to Zendesk seven years ago and immediately saw the first reply time improve by 59 percent. Satisfied with the simple onboarding and app integration, Monese has since stepped up its investment in Zendesk, upgrading to Suite Enterprise Plus with SunCo messaging, and is now beginning to use Zendesk’s Advanced AI capabilities with impressive results.

“Over the past three years we’ve seen a really big change in our customer experience, we’ve reshaped our messaging functionality, and customer satisfaction has increased, as have the efficiencies of our staff,” explains VP of Customer Service and CX, Daniel Wright.

Monese

Messaging delivers the missing pieces

The rollout of asynchronous messaging was completed in May 2023, enabling agents to talk to customers across any platform, while delivering an advanced conversational experience for customers.

“The migration to messaging was straightforward and gave us all the missing pieces we took for granted – for instance, we were previously missing push notifications for message replies and we now have faster machine translations,” says Wright.

Thanks to these dynamic conversation capabilities, first reply time on Messaging is now less than four minutes, while CSAT has jumped 31.5 percent. “It’s just like WhatsApping with a friend,” he adds, referring to the power of push notifications. “Now the customer knows we’ll continue to provide support in the background if they leave the chat and carry on with their day, because they receive a notification to say we’ve replied and they can jump back into the app and continue the conversation.”

The move to SunCo allowed Monese to make the most of Zendesk’s bot builder and now 36 percent of messages are solved without even speaking to an agent. The aim is to encourage customers to use the bot wherever possible, with 33 percent of all communications going through the channel currently.

“You’ve got to look at our customer base–our product is mobile, so it makes sense,” adds Stephen Chang, Chief Operating Officer. “Emails are inefficient and the interaction with us is so much better with messaging.”

Monese

Advanced AI and add-on benefits

Leveraging Zendesk’s Advanced AI add-on is the next step in the journey for Monese, with the business starting to experiment with Intelligent Triage to ensure smooth workflows while bot responses are enriched by machine learning predictions using language, sentiment, and intent to ensure a seamless conversation. When the request needs a more personal touch, the AI tool simply hands it over to a customer service agent.

“We need to ensure the customer has the best experience. We don’t want it to be too robotic, so agents can jump in where needed,” said Chang.

Wright explains how a non-technical problem, such as a change of address, can be managed by the bot builder which navigates customers to help themselves. While with more complex problems, such as a missing payment, the AI bot can ask the customer for the necessary additional information, collate the data in one place, and hand over to an agent when needed–all while picking up on customer sentiment and language to provide a better experience.

“Quite often the bot has done so much of the back and forth, the customer doesn’t respond when the agent comes to the chat because the money has already landed in their account by then,” says Wright.

Going forward, Monese plans to utilize Advanced AI further by integrating business data to give the bots smarter replies, such as prioritizing reply times for premium customers and tailoring responses further.

“What I love most about Zendesk is the set-up,” says Wright. “We’re a fast-paced business and we don’t have months and months to set up solutions. Advanced AI is ready out of the box and works for a financial services model. You just plug it in, set up flows, and go. And you don’t have to worry about training from day one.”

The same goes for app integrations: “Other software requires scoping and technology resources to build and set up. But with Zendesk, we don’t have to pay for multiple tools we don’t need–we just seamlessly integrate apps like Tymeshift, Klaus, and Twilio and it’s ready to go out-of-the-box.”

In fact, since incorporating Tymeshift, Monese has seen great improvements in the time it takes to create schedules for agents. “It’s reduced a lot of the admin work involved in creating shift patterns and task schedules, resulting in a time saving of 82 percent” says Wright.

Monese

Zendesk in Ops

The training for Zendesk is so minimal that the solution is no longer being used solely as a customer service tool and has been adopted seamlessly in other operational departments. This means complex customer queries–such as when the AI detects phrases that suggest fraud or money laundering–can be passed over to the relevant team who can work within Zendesk to solve the problem.

“It helps the operational and customer service teams identify who can resolve the question,” says Chang. “It’s a no-brainer to use Advanced AI for this.”

“Ops used to see Zendesk as a tool to send customers emails. But now they realize it helps manage influxes of work,” says Wright, who points to Zendesk for its reporting functionality, too. “When operations were struggling to find data, the customer services team had those because of Zendesk.”

“We’re re-engineering the way we deal with customers,” says Chang, who notes how the simplicity of Zendesk combined with automation frees up staff to work on these more complex cases. “We can have multiple teams dealing with one problem very quickly. We’re consolidating teams. All these teams are using Zendesk and my gut tells me we’ll be saving money taking this approach because it’s all about capacity management and fewer tasks. Fewer processes lead to cost savings.”

AI of the future

What about five years from now? Where do Wright and Chang expect to be in terms of AI?

“AI will continue to complement manual human work,” believes Wright. “In banking, it’s more difficult to get 90 percent of communications to be automated, so the key focus will be to automate those low complexity queries and streamline the complex ones to an agent. The layer of sentiment is key, making sure the AI knows when it’s time to hand off to an agent and provide them with the data we have to make their job easier.”

“Every financial services company is under a lot more pressure,” he adds. “Banking is a heavily regulated environment, so we have to make sure we have sufficient processes streamlined and access to business data. And we’re doing that while we’re going through ambitious growth trajectories.”

Wherever AI can ease operations, Monese will consider its use. “We need to reply to customers with the best data and in the quickest time,” concludes Chang. “Zendesk is integral to our business at this time –it allows us to continue building the best payments and authorization technology.”