Commercial Bank of Dubai witnesses over 50% reduction in ticket resolution time with Freshdesk

About Commercial Bank of Dubai 

Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) is a UAE banking and financial services corporation headquartered in Deira, Dubai. CBD is the UAE's seventh largest bank, with over USD 23 billion in assets, and the first to go fully digital. CBD provides a full range of banking and financial services, including personal banking, loan insurance, and digital banking products designed around customer lifestyles.

Having been the key driver of UAE's economic growth, CBD tops the Forbes list of the World’s Best Banks 2022. 

A day in the life of the CBD customer experience team

CBD serves major corporations, government agencies, and other financial institutions worldwide, with high-ticket transactions amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Thus, zero trust security for customer data and efficient customer service are paramount.

Working in this high-stake ecosystem, the customer experience team at CBD provides critical query resolution for its commercial customers on the next banking day. Typical queries involve providing updates and clarifications on payment status, online banking platform guidance, requests for a new card online, and more.

The customer service process at CBD is more complex than other organizations because of the size of the transactions in question. Dedicated resources handle requests in each banking area, including trade, online banking, and bank reporting, to ensure nothing falls through the gaps.

CBD's customer service champions sift through every query and assign it to the appropriate micro team based on the skill set and knowledge level required to address it.

The teams then cater to these queries through

1. Knowledge Base

CBD has an extensive knowledge base comprising 500+ user guides for self-service, which helps their customers get quick resolutions for common queries without any agent intervention.

2. Service requests

If customers cannot resolve their query using the knowledge base articles, the CBD customer experience executives receive the requests and manage and close them. 

This process, however, was only sometimes as seamless for CBD. In the initial days, ticket resolution within a set timeframe was challenging for the customer experience team. This was when they decided to change things up.

The need to change the narrative

Customers would primarily reach out to CBD via email and a dedicated phone line. The requests would pile up in a shared mailbox the team had to manually segregate into four different mailboxes for agents to pick and respond to. The frustration was high, and since there was no ticket assignment process, a lack of ownership was prevalent. 

Furthermore, keeping track of individual queries and the actions needed to resolve them had become cumbersome. Customers would mail queries to different mailboxes under the same subject line. A lack of cohesive communication led to longer turnaround times and a poor customer service experience.

Additionally, the setup needed to give the team more visibility into the quality of customer service, and hence improving the process became time-consuming and effort intensive. 

The need of the hour for CBD was to transform the narrative of its customer service function and make the process simple, seamless, and secure. This was when Freshdesk by Freshworks entered the story. CBD evaluated multiple helpdesk solutions before zeroing in on Freshdesk for its adaptability and ease of integration. 

The litmus test of outcomes 

Soon after CBD first switched to Freshdesk, the impact of the implementation on the bank’s customer-first methodology became evident in the changes in customer experience. 

Some key outcomes of the transition were -

• Seamless and transparent ticket resolution – Before Freshdesk, the customer service team handled customer queries as they came in, without a big-picture view of how many emails they received, the status of the query, and so on. With Freshdesk, the team gained 360-degree visibility into the customer lifecycle, with no missed tickets, resolution process verification, and more.

• Self-service enablement – To minimize the load on agents, CBD deployed self-service. They allowed customers to help themselves with basic queries like login issues or forgetting their pins. This has minimized the effort leakage from the customer service team in resolving repetitive queries. And the customers welcomed the change – CBD's self-service resources currently have over 100,000 views.

• Reduction in query volume – The average number of tickets CBD receives per month has gone down from 2500 to 1800 due to customer self-service and customer education. Now, the agents focus on managing only complex queries, significantly impacting their productivity. 

Achieving a seamless transition 

While the results were impeccable, the scale of the channel switch to Freshdesk initially seemed challenging to the customers and the customer experience team. However, careful planning and coordination with the Freshworks team, along with extensive communication internally and externally, ensured a smooth and seamless transition without any hitches. The feedback and support that Ben received for the transition to Freshdesk was overwhelming and reaffirmed the need for the solution.

Customer adoption was a top priority for CBD during the undertaking. A new website link and an online support portal made it easier for customers to access Freshdesk directly. The detailed go-live communication on channel usage supported these elements regularly during the transition period to handhold customers across the critical juncture. The customer success team was an integral part of the implementation of Freshdesk, making the onboarding and training process quicker and simpler. 

The key features that led to an enhanced experience

The Freshdesk implementation has had ripple effects throughout the customer experience delivery process. Automation has become a go-to productivity feature for the customer experience team, who currently use over 60 automation in Freshdesk. 

Automation helps the team with smart ticket assignment and provides automatic replies to repetitive queries with links to self-help articles with additional support by the agents when required. It helps the smart channeling of tickets powered by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration to ensure only commercial banking queries are put through to Freshdesk and redirect others to the right channel.

Freshdesk has also helped the customer service team prioritize tickets from high-value customers by tagging them as urgent/high priority to ensure quick resolution for an enhanced experience. Round robin has become a favorite feature, ensuring ticket loads are spread evenly across the team to hone efficiency and create a level playing field for all the agents.

Apps and integrations that have made a difference 

A key aspect of Freshworks ecosystem is the Freshworks Marketplace(part of the Freshworks Neo platform portfolio). Freshworks Marketplace provides customers access to more than 1300+ public apps for their integration, automation, and customization needs. Customers can also choose to build custom apps for their unique business needs.

CBD has been using multiple apps from the Freshworks Marketplace, including a mix of custom and Public apps spread across agent productivity, security, risk, and governance.

Public Apps such as ‘Hide Fields’ and ‘Bulk Ticket  Manager Light’ help drive agent productivity.  Similarly, custom Apps from Freshworks Marketplace, like ‘Masking app’, ensure customer protection and compliance. They have also added a ‘CC app ’ powered by Freshworks Marketplace to the mix as a security measure that ensures compliance with Central Bank guidelines. Another custom app that  CBD uses is ‘Account Information App’, which combines siloed customer data onto a single pane in the Freshdesk solution, so the agent can now see information on one screen for which they had to switch apps previously.

Data management made easy and insightful with Analytics

Freshdesk has changed the narrative of the customer experience at CBD. It has enabled the CBD customer service executives to deliver high performance through quick responses and improved response time for the closure of tickets and customer fulfillment. The CSAT survey results have been soaring since the implementation of Freshdesk. 

Agents also love working with the solution. The team now gamifies work by tracking data on Freshdesk Analytics about who has resolved the most queries, who has the quickest TAT, and more. It has built a healthy sense of competition within the customer experience team and has become a powerful motivator for improving the overall customer experience and employee performance. To build on this momentum, CBD recognizes agents with great performances with incentives based on insights from the Freshdesk Analytics data. The teams can find the reports and dashboards from Analytics displayed on a large flatscreen in the office, which catalyzes performance. 

A customer response on iServe said, ‘CBD is leading the way in digital customer service.’

The team also uses Freshdesk Analytics reports guiding customers better based on the insights from the tickets. It has reduced ticket volumes significantly by helping the customer service team bridge gaps in the knowledge base and self-service materials by analyzing recurring ticket information. 

Another area where CBD has benefited from Freshdesk Analytics is resource allocation based on resolution time for each banking area. Thus, Analytics has proven to create a transformative experience for both employees and customers of CBD.

Freshdesk - the bankable game changer of customer service

Freshdesk has brought the modern banking experience home at CBD. It has helped support the end-to-end digitization at CBD by enabling the customer experience team to rapidly deliver value with each customer interaction. The customer feedback reflects the enhanced experience of Freshdesk, which has bolstered the customer-first tenet of CBD.

The confidence that Freshdesk brings to the table with customer service management is that ‘Nothing is impossible’ with bankable support and implementation. Freshdesk empowers the customer experience team to handle process setup and deployment, requiring very little intervention from the IT team. 

Thus, engaging with Freshworks has been fulfilling in creating a great journey for CBD customers and the customer experience team.