Genial invests in Zendesk CX to serve a growing financial market
Faced with the expansion in operations and the demand for service, Genial Investimentos adopts Zendesk solutions to integrate its channels, resulting in high dividends, with a 95% reduction in call resolution time and improved customer satisfaction.
“Zendesk responded very well to the 'boom' in calls during the pandemic and was instrumental in keeping our customer interaction agile.”
Cláudio Pracownik
Executive Director at Genial Investimentos
“Flexibility and scope allowed the Zendesk tool to be incorporated into the daily routine of several areas of Genial.”
Bruno Maximo
Head of Customer Service at Genial Investimentos
Number of agents
50
Company headquarters
São Paulo, Brazil
Zendesk customer since
2018
-95%
Decrease in call resolution time
+70
Increase in tickets managed monthly
3X
Demand growth via chat
+183%
Increase in monthly ticket volume
Genial Investimentos, a digital investment platform owned by Brasil Plural, is one of the fastest growing brokerages in Brazil. Among its most prominent recent moves are a campaign to attract children and teenagers to the world of investments and the possibility of carrying out a public offering of shares (IPO).
All this is the result of the recent growth of the financial industry in Brazil. While experienced investors and ‘daily traders’ look for other income possibilities besides fixed income, new opportunities keep emerging – from young investors interested in entering the investment market to the offer of new multi-market funds.
It was no wonder that the number of individuals with an account opened at B3, the Brazilian stock exchange, grew 76% between December 2019 and August 2020, reaching close to 3 million potential investors, according to data from the stock exchange itself.
The natural consequence of all this was the explosion of 74%, on average, in the volume of clients served in the first five months of 2020 by brokers and asset management companies. Another common challenge in the market is to please a highly qualified audience. “Our clients are investors who trust the platform with their money, which is extremely important for anyone,” says Bruno Máximo, head of customer service at Genial Investimentos.
A decision was made to keep up with all these advances, without losing the differentials that allowed interacting with various customer profiles. Genial’s team realized the need to adopt a more advanced customer service solution than the one used until then – which only allowed service via telephone and chat, without intelligent management based on data provided by customers.
In March 2019, Genial initiated a partnership with Zendesk. This move added to the brokerage’s service channels, offered the advanced functionalities of an integrated CRM platform, and delivered a set of solutions dedicated to managing customer relationships.
Zendesk metrics reporting products were implemented, which provide customer analytics and support category verification, customer service data and chat monitoring; Zendesk Support which allows the team to monitor, prioritize and resolve calls opened by customers; Zendesk Guide, which serves as a knowledge base and help center; and Zendesk Chat, which enables instant communication with customers.
Investing in the potential of CRM
In the first months of the partnership, Genial had not yet explored the full potential of the Zendesk platform. “Initially, the solutions were only configured to support customer service via phone and chat, something we already had before. All the intelligence that the solution is capable of providing, such as recording the information for each call, was being underutilized until then,” says Máximo.
This changed in October 2019 when Genial expanded the use of Zendesk solutions, taking advantage of other features that added even more intelligence to service management. This allowed Genial to start recording and monitoring all calls in detail. Based on this new functionality, it was possible to create a categorization tree to facilitate the internal distribution of each request according to specific criteria, such as the level of urgency and the areas that would need to be involved in the resolution – a practice that optimized the management of tickets.
All of this was possible because Zendesk solutions began to be used across various departments of the company – not only by the customer support team. In addition to using the platform for customer service, Genial has access to information extracted from the relationship with the applicators. The objective is to enable internal analyzes that help deliver an effective and personalized solution for each consumer’s pain.
“The flexibility and scope of the tool allowed it to be incorporated into the day-to-day of the entire company. Before, requests circulated between areas only by e-mail. Now, through the Zendesk platform, the entire organization has greater visibility into customer pain and exchanges information more quickly,” explains Máximo.
A new omnichannel vision
Today, there are four areas at Genial that have contact with the customer: service, advice, trading desk, and platforms. This new routine, associated with the expansion of the brokerage house, accompanied the growth of the service team, which jumped from 4 to 30 agents in 12 months.
Today Genial interacts with customers through telephone, chat, email, social networks (mainly Facebook) and the help center – a self-service channel with articles that help customers themselves get answers – all these channels are fully integrated. In addition, APIs were implemented to add to the platform the function of triggering by e-mail.
Zendesk’s portfolio even gave agents the ability to access the history of interactions with customers. In this way, with prior knowledge of the demands of each consumer, it was possible to provide faster service.
With a broader view of customer information, all of which are concentrated on a single screen, Genial eliminated the need to use up to eight different tools, as was the case before. This helped to optimize agent productivity, supporting the increase in demand due to the growth of the brokerage – which saw the monthly volume of service calls rise 183% between 2019 and 2020.
With the support of a more advanced technology, the monthly number of tickets managed by operators increased 70% in this period.
“Zendesk’s solutions have brought even more dynamism to the operation because they give visibility to data such as service history, pending calls and the reason for the contact made by the customer. Thus, we were able to respond more quickly to calls, in addition to better monitoring the journey of each customer,” says Mayara Pacheco, customer service coordinator at Genial Investimentos, responsible for the quality and monitoring of the support team.
More productivity
Today, with the availability of several service channels, the telephone is no longer the most sought after option by Genial’s customers. Currently, this channel requires only 30% of the team’s demand, which saves agents valuable time.
Most calls are made via chat, which tripled from 13% to 40% between 2019 and 2020. The company attributes this development to the availability of chat on the Zendesk platform, in addition to a worldwide trend in consumer behavior.
“The percentage of calls via telephone is not lower only because of the nature of our business. Many people need to speak directly to the investment adviser. But the use of chat will certainly continue to grow,” explains Mayara.
Luis Gustavo Vieira, customer service coordinator at Genial Investimentos, confirms that chat is usually the best alternative for most investors. “Our service team, in many cases, guide customers to use the chat. Most of the time, this channel delivers a quicker response than the phone,” he reports. Since partnering with Zendesk, average ticket resolution time has dropped by 95%, from 54 hours to 2.7 hours.
With Zendesk Guide, Genial has enriched its help center, which today has more than 200 active articles. The contents are continuously improved by the service team and increasingly serve as support for customers who opt for self-service – even though there are multiple channels available for direct interaction with the support team.
Dynamism and scalability
Measuring the reasons for contact allowed Genial to create a specific area just to answer technical and operational questions about the use of its investment platform, which corresponds to around 30% of customer calls. Other frequently asked questions are related to items such as login and password verification (a very important security feature for an investment platform), registration and products.
Clients seeking advice, guidance or investment recommendations can also use the service channels integrated in this structure – in this case, with the support of Zendesk Chat. The same occurs with investors who directly activate the trading desk, which is also integrated into the platform.
For Cláudio Pracownik, executive director of Genial Investimentos, the main advantage of the partnership with Zendesk is its dynamism. “During the pandemic, contrary to our expectations, customer demand for our service area increased a lot. But the structure that we set up in partnership with Zendesk supported this ‘boom’ of calls very well, which was essential to maintain the agility of interactions,” he says.
Also according to Pracownik, the platform followed the growth that Genial has experienced in the last two years, helping to increase the team’s productivity and successfully supporting the organic increase in customer demand.
Something that attests to the importance of the current customer service structure is Genial’s analysis of the eventual adoption of any new tool that supports its day-to-day operations. Before implementing new software, the company considers it essential to ensure that it can work seamlessly with the Zendesk platform.