Fave + Zendesk: Gaining speed, insight and traction

Since 2015, Fave, one of Southeast Asia’s fintech companies, has been empowering businesses—from restaurants to spas—to grow and connect with their customers. Customers in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and India can seamlessly pay bills with the merchant, choose flexible installment plans, redeem deals and take advantage of loyalty programs through the Fave app.

“Our mission is to make everyday shopping experience special, and we do so by helping offline businesses to transition into the digital world and connect with customers in a whole new way,” explains Dilhany Jayawardena, regional head of operations at Fave. The products in Fave’s portfolio that vary by country include FavePay, a QR-based payment platform enabling customers to pay at a merchant store by scanning QR; Cashback, a popular loyalty program that allows customers to earn cash back with every purchase; Buy Now Pay Later and digital cards for savings and deals.

When Fave was setting up its Customer Happiness Team, the company relied solely on emails to satisfy customer queries. “Everyone felt like it was crucial to provide immediate assistance. As we grew, we started exploring chat and different tools providers, and I’m happy we chose Zendesk,” remembers Dilhany. The team wanted to become more organized, easily track all the queries, and gain more actionable insights into the concerns of their customers.

Gaining speed and traction

The team integrated the entire Zendesk Suite into its mobile app, offering social messaging, email, live chat, and help desk library to its users. Implementing a vast array of tools was a challenge, so Fave started by experimenting with roll-outs. “Initially we had different agents for chat and email,” explains Jia Yun Low, the team lead for Customer Happiness at Fave. “To streamline user experience, we decided to have our agents handle both chat and emails at the same time. Each change takes time and effort to adapt, thus we implemented this in batches: we did a trial with a small group of agents, then we added some more.”

However, managing multiple channels was challenging for the Customer Happiness team. To simplify interactions, Fave decided to move everyone to the Zendesk Agent Workspace which consolidated everything into one interface. “Our agents are quite happy to have just one tab open, it helps with focus and productivity,” adds Low.

Optimizing operations

At the Customer Happiness team, one of the more tedious tasks was assigning tickets to agents. Previously, managers would manually assign tickets to agents at the start of each shift which was time-consuming. To streamline the process, the Fave team implemented Round Robin, which automatically assigns tickets to available agents. This freed up managers to invest more time in guiding and training the team.

Once tickets were assigned, the agents began tagging customer concerns. This enabled the team to gain deeper insight into the common issues. “It used to be all opinions and no data,” says Dilhany. “Tagging has turned out to be a very useful tool. We can look up specific issues with keywords, go through the history and see how often they occurred. Our agents have definitely become more receptive and informed.”

The insights helped the Fave team be more proactive with customer concerns. The data also informed Fave’s implementation of Article Recommendations, which prompts help articles to customers based on need. Recommendations helped users gain the most value out of the help center. For Low, the adaptability of Zendesk is one of the platform’s key strengths. “I have really appreciated being able to customize things based on the needs of our team and based on what makes sense for us. This has made it easier to manage our workload and track team performance,” she shares.

As the team fully mastered Zendesk solutions, Fave decided to also move the merchant-facing team to Zendesk. “Even though we had a tiny window to migrate the agents, the process was quite seamless thanks to the Zendesk team,” says Dilhany. “The Zendesk account managers have always been there for us. They have provided a very personal service and guided us through every issue providing solutions and resources, sharing relevant articles and even walking us through the set up process on their screens when needed. I greatly appreciate their support.”

Celebrating the big wins

All these changes have empowered Fave to achieve its goals and offer outstanding service. With a CSAT score of 90 percent, the Customer Happiness team is closer than ever to achieving its 96 percent target. Another crucial performance indicator for Fave is monthly queries per customer, the percentage of inquiries received from customers. The team has managed to reach its target rate of less than 1 percent, recently hitting 0.5 percent.

Most importantly, Fave’s primary goal—providing immediate support—has been achieved with flying colors. The average response time has reached its target mark of 60 seconds. The average ticket full resolution time has exceeded all expectations, reaching 43 hours, which is well below the 48-hour target (based on 2022 Fave data). “In terms of the impact on our customers, what I am most proud of is that we are always able to provide immediate service. It has always been our top priority to never disrupt the journey of our customers,” adds Dilhany.

Looking forward

The Fave team is determined to continue leveraging Zendesk solutions and gradually bring customer service to the next level. Some tasks on the agenda include expanding the tools for the merchant team, including live chat, and exploring features like the bot builder.

“Ever since we embarked on this journey, I can clearly see growth in terms of the service provided to us and in terms of the service we provide,” Dilhany concludes. “I am very proud of our team that has implemented and managed these various features. This journey is on us, and we have to continue to make the most of this experience.”

All data presented in this article is based on 2022 Fave Data.