Our “Behind the Scenes” series continues with the Customer Success Manager team and Pablo Prévôt who has recently taken a position as a Customer Success Manager in France.
To start with, why is the Customer Success team important?
October has a hybrid funding model, which consists of institutional and private lenders. Our private lenders are essential in this diversified funding model. In combination with institutional investors, they have granted over one billion euro in loans to projects from SMEs. The customer success team is essential as we increase lenders satisfaction, loyalty, and we act as a spokesperson for our lenders base.
Can you describe the role of October Customer Success Team?
Our team’s job at October is different every day, but the thing that is first on our agenda is support. We want to provide fast and simple support and help lenders with everything they need.
Over the last year, we have focused on improving our responsiveness on the chat. Our median response time is less than 10 minutes. Compared to last year our response time has already decreased with 4 minutes. We are a team of 6, that apart from providing support via the chat creates specialized tutorials to inform you about several topics related to our platform. And we send emails or other messages with answers to questions that our lenders might not even have thought of asking yet. It’s important that we stay one step ahead.
We also do more than just support lenders. The Customer Success team aims to make the platform better by interacting with lenders and doing data analytics. Getting feedback from our lenders is key. It helps us have new and interesting ideas for features, content or other improvements. That’s why we started the “Lenders Voice”. It’s a way for us to hear from lenders that want to be more involved and share their opinion with regular surveys. So, if you’re a lender, do not hesitate to share your opinion in a chat conversation with us or join the Lenders Voice.
How does the Customer Success team work?
Our Customer Success Team is divided by country. Our lender base is mainly across four different countries: France, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands. We also offer English services as we have lenders in other countries.
Each country has one or several Customer Success Managers. In the case of France, we are two Customer Success Managers, Nicolas and me. This allows for specific local knowledge concerning questions that our lenders may have, such as taxation or compliance questions, among other topics. Having this local level of support makes sure that our investors have the resources they need to make informed decisions.
What are the upcoming challenges for your team?
Our team faces challenges as we want to continuously improve everything related to lenders, and we need to keep up to date with new regulations. This is why we have put in place various tools to measure the engagement and satisfaction of our lenders.
One of these tools is a NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey. It is a simple survey that we use to measure customer satisfaction and that helps us identify areas for improvement. In our latest NPS survey, we received feedback from our lenders that they would like more insightful and regular recovery updates for their projects. We have taken this feedback into account and are currently working on improving our communication. Our goal is to present all the information and possible outcomes for recovery procedures in a clear and concise manner. We recognize the importance of keeping our lenders informed. Therefore, we are committed to providing regular updates to ensure they are up-to-date on their investments.
We also take the new ESCP regulation of the European Union very seriously. The ECSP has established uniform rules to regulate crowdfunding platforms. We believe that this will not only improve our platform, but also enhance our lenders experience with us. There will be noticeable changes, and we want to make sure the transition is smooth, and you are aware of all changes. We took the first step by writing a tutorial about all the changes you can expect. I encourage you to read it (here).
Another important challenge that we constantly face is to increase the awareness and popularity of crowdfunding, as a viable financial product. We want to show that lending to businesses provide investors with an interesting return while at the same time helping these businesses. We are always looking for new lenders.
So, if you’re not a lender yet, feel free to check our informative content about lending and join the platform!