FinChoice improves first-response time to 90% with easy messaging integrations within Freshdesk Omnichannel, powered by the Neo platform 

About FinChoice

FinChoice is a 15-year-old digital financial services provider specializing in loans, insurance, and VAS products. It serves a growing base of customers in Africa who need financial support  Mostly, these customers reach out to FinChoice for numerous types of loan inquiries - how to get a loan, loan status, loan cancellation, and payment issues, to name a few.

Before implementing Freshworks’ products, phone and email were the preferred channels of customer support for FinChoice. However, these channels couldn’t scale with the company’s growing needs. Hence, they started the search for a unified customer support platform to drive automation and digital customer support. And Freshdesk Omnichannel became their platform of choice.

We spoke to Farrah Abdurahman, who heads digital experience at FinChoice and has been working with Freshworks products for over a decade. Farrah helped us understand how Freshworks played a pivotal role in improving the team’s productivity and customer experience at FinChoice.
 

The Challenges

The teams at FinChoice received about 60K tickets/queries per month. Initially, they provided customer support over the phone and helped route incoming queries to respective departments. On paydays, the team had to deal with a huge volume of incoming queries, and it was almost impossible to manage them over the phone. This led to higher resolution time, which meant the customers had to wait longer.

In the last few years, as the internet and social media penetrated people’s lives, FinChoice decided to redefine its customer support strategy to keep up. They had to look for ways to tap into the potential of social media to provide proactive, real-time customer support. While the company evaluated other helpdesk solutions, it chose Freshdesk Omnichannel to digitize its customer support function.

Driving Digital Transformation with Freshdesk Omnichannel

FinChoice has been working towards enabling about 80% of its users to connect via digital channels for support instead of the traditional phone and email channels. Freshdesk Omnichannel, backed by the Freshworks Neo platform, is playing a key role in helping the company realize this goal – with easy-to-setup automation, advanced integrations, and insight-driven analytics.

Streamlining tickets faster with Freshdesk Automation

With automation within Freshdesk, FinChoice’s support team could automatically segregate and assign tickets. For example, tickets could be prioritized and assigned automatically to the right teams depending on the channel used by the customer, like social media or email, and the content of their query. Currently, over 80% of customer support tasks are being handled via some form of automation.

Automatic ticket assignment ensured queries were instantly brought to the right team's attention. It saved a lot of time for the email support team, who spent hours manually sorting and routing tickets. This way, ticket resolution time and customer satisfaction increased drastically. With all the automation being used, FinChoice reduced its response time in hours by 53% and also reduced resolution time by 11% over the past year.

Enhancing agent productivity with apps from Freshworks Marketplace

FinChoice has been using more than 10 apps from the Freshworks Marketplace, including a couple of custom apps, spread across key aspects of customer service, including agent productivity, collaboration, and workflow automation. Apps such as Attachment manager and Auto ticket merger have increased agent productivity. Other apps such as Sentimental Jeff! have helped Finchoice service the customer by analyzing the requestor's ticket sentiment and rating it on a whole number scale, helping it quickly judge the tone of the message.  

Freshworks has a thriving Marketplace enriched with an ecosystem of expert developers and strategic partners. Freshworks Marketplace provides customers access to more than 1100+ public apps for their integration, automation, and customization needs. Customers can also choose to build custom apps for their unique business needs.

 
“Yes, we do use custom applications that have been created for our team. The Freshworks Marketplace is really great as a lot of applications that we want to integrate are readily available. A perfect example of this, was about two weeks back, we launched the Finchoice mobile application on the Google Play Store, we needed to retrieve the reviews the from the Google Play Store interface and the app for that was readily available on Marketplace. We were able to install the application and go through the setup quickly, which was terrific! Freshworks also have other applications that are available like Google My business Manager, Attachment Manager, and Hide Fields, all of which I’ve brought into our setup. Freshworks are able to foresee what we need, not only for bigger companies but also SME’s. Additionally, if something is not available, they are able to build it for us or we can have our internal team create it, both super helpful and convenient." Farrah, Digital Experience, FinChoice

Conversing in real-time with Freshchat

Owing to social media’s growing popularity in the African community, a lot of FinChoice ’s customer base is on social media. FinChoice wanted to gain more traction on these social apps to build awareness about their financial services and provide instantaneous support to customers on their channel of choice.  

Powered by Freshworks’ strategic relationships with global technology partners and the extensibility of the Freshworks Neo platform, FinChoice enjoyed easy messaging app integrations with Freshchat to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience. Automations recently introduced on chat have helped resolve 10% of the queries automatically.

Integrating Freshdesk with Freshchat also allowed support teams to engage with customers through channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Google's Business Messages. Google's Business Messages integration enabled FinChoice to engage high-intent visitors from Google Search and Google Maps to drive smarter, richer conversation, and eventually boost sales. The customer context within Freshchat from across messaging apps helps agents proactively engage with customers and encourage customers to take action on the go. Customer support had just become faster, easier, and context-driven for FinChoice. 

Improving Collaboration and Meeting SLAs with the Freshdesk and Slack integration 

With Freshdesk, FinChoice customers are getting quick answers. Unlike the traditional channels with longer wait times, customers receive same-day responses. The company’s first response SLA achievement improved to 90%, and the resolution SLA currently sits between 90% and 100%. Since Freshdesk is hosted on AWS, customer support agents can instantly access customer data anywhere. As a result, FinChoice sees drastic improvement in CSAT scores. Through Freshchat, agents could reply in real-time across various channels. It has also improved the volume of customer interactions on social media – a priority for the company.

FinChoice decided to configure the Freshdesk-Slack integration (backed by the Neo platform) to make the support agents' life easier. The integration with Slack helped bring ticket & customer context from within Freshdesk into the agent’s native workspace in Slack. Agents can now stay on top of ticket updates in real time, share context to collaborate with internal stakeholders, and resolve tickets faster.

Simplifying Document Collection for Loan Processing with WhatsApp

For FinChoice, collecting and verifying documents is a critical step in processing customer loans. Earlier, the support team had to keep track of emails to organize and sort documents. The team found a simpler way to do it with Freshdesk-WhatsApp integration.

With WhatsApp integrated, the team could easily track and proactively follow up with customers during document verification. And with WhatsApp’s growing popularity in South Africa, FinChoice ’s team is looking to use the channel for supporting customers - within the year.

Forecasting Workload and Planning Resources Efficiently with Analytics

Freshdesk Analytics enabled FinChoice to build custom reports per the needs of various teams. The teams found report building with Analytics very easy and especially loved the degree of customizations available. It helped them simplify large volumes of customer support data into meaningful, actionable insights. 

One of the key insights they received from Analytics was the volume of tickets coming in each day. This helped them understand the workload better and improve load balancing among agents and teams. FinChoice could proactively forecast and create shift rosters for agents more efficiently with improved visibility into tickets and volumes.

Why Freshworks 

FinChoice wanted to partner with a vendor from Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. Freshworks was described as a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant in 2021. Among the other vendors, Freshdesk seemed much more cost-effective, offered varied automation, and could efficiently channel and integrate with 3rd party apps. FinChoice found Freshdesk to be user-friendly for both the agents and the administrators.

Implement Easily, Scale Securely

Businesses often find it difficult to configure and manage integrations. Piece-meal messaging integrations increase the total cost of ownership in the absence of a unified platform-backed solution. The Freshworks products, backed by the Neo Platform, provide easy integrations, improved scalability, and security for businesses. 

When asked about her favorites in the Freshdesk system, Farrah said, “The availability of integrations based on our needs and the ease of setup - whether it is the configuration of integrations or the installation of applications - are big winners for us. Also, I appreciate the ease of automation: they are not only easy to set up and use but also easy to distinguish where issues are occurring. Plus, your support team is available via chat or the ticketing system 24/7, their response times are great. I only have positive statements to make about the Freshdesk team.”

What’s Ahead for FinChoice

As the company grows, it looks forward to enlarging the support team size and procuring more Freshdesk Omnichannel licenses. It aims to expand its digital support channels and enable more customers to connect digitally and achieve the FinChoice business vision of being its customer’s favorite digital financial services provider.