Thunes is a Singapore-based global payments infrastructure company that has built a proprietary global network for an improved and more connected cross-border payment experience. It facilitates real-time cross-border payments by building simple payment pathways between its network across 130 countries. Thunes’ solution connects the old systems with the new ones, allowing businesses and consumers to instantly send and accept payments anywhere in the world, no matter which payment method they choose.
Challenge of legacy customer care solutions
While Thunes was making breakthroughs in payments technology, its legacy customer care solution fell short of expectations. It lacked visibility and automation options and didn’t allow for problems to be flagged and solved in real-time. Thus Thunes needed a more advanced service solution to keep its growth on track and empower employees to deliver exceptional service.

Babul Balakrishnan, Global Head of Customer Care, Thunes shared, “Joining Thunes in August 2021, my focus was on three things: systems, people and processes, to support our aggressive customer growth. We needed empathetic people to optimise our processes and ensure customers stayed with us. Employees are at the forefront of delivering good experiences to customers. If you don’t give them the right processes and tools to do their work happily, the customer isn’t going to get good service, which might result in churn. We wanted to take our service levels from good to great.”

What Thunes needed was a solution that offered transparency to shed light on problem areas. It also needed to enable users to optimise workflows where necessary while being easy to adopt.

Jennifer Aleria, NetOps Success Manager, Thunes shared, “We faced a major challenge with transaction delays, requiring manual follow-ups with partners that hurt our customer experience.”

And after much research, Thunes decided to partner with Zendesk to achieve this goal of improving its processing time and adding tools and automated workflows to reduce manual effort.

Empowering employees to deliver exceptional service
For six months, the company worked closely with Zendesk Professional Services to understand the requirements and fine-tune the solution before going live in June 2022. Thunes’ internal Customer Care (CC) team also spent many hours learning about the new system to ensure they could take over operations easily and continue to deliver a seamless experience to agents.

Zendesk’s solution enhanced agent productivity in two distinct ways. First, it enabled Thunes to automate workflows and repetitive tasks, reducing agents’ time resolving tickets. The new solution includes 20 automated workflows that automatically close old tickets and send follow-up emails when necessary. It also has more than 100 triggers that auto-complete ticket fields for data analysis before assigning it to the correct agent group, and 200 plus macros that save agents handling time.

Secondly, data about customer interactions and employee performance is stored in six custom dashboards. This includes a dashboard about customers that collates the number of tickets resolved and the time taken to respond to queries. Another dashboard tracks agent productivity and KPIs. Hence this data offers Thunes a huge amount of granularity to deep dive into when, how often, and what time tickets come in to reassign shifts for efficiency. In addition, Thunes also has a separate dashboard that monitors activity by network partners, and one master dashboard that monitors performance across the company.

78% decrease in first response rate, 22% decrease in resolution time

The numbers speak for themselves. Thunes has witnessed a 78% decrease in first response rate, a 22% decrease in resolution time. As a result, it has been able to save 1.28 mins per agent and is processing 15k monthly tickets. Most tickets are now resolved within 24 hours.

Babul shares, “With a focus on quick wins and long-term projects, we implemented a support tool capable of automation and data-driven insights. Our 3-year vision is to move from reactive to proactive customer service, and we’ve had incredible results with a dedicated team and cross-functional support. It’s been an amazing journey towards excellent customer experiences.”

In addition, employee productivity has since shot up as a result. Between July and September of 2022, the number of monthly tickets decreased from 45,000 to 15,000, with two-thirds of the queries resolved with a single interaction. Agents handle each ticket 35 percent faster now, saving approximately 320 hours a month – equivalent to two full-time agents.

Hence by optimising performance through automation and data, Thunes has not only been able to increase employee productivity but also turn happy customers into loyal customers.
Karine Bauquis, Head of Customer Care – Collections, Thunes shared, “A superior customer experience is critical to the success of any business, and one of the most important factors in achieving this is delivering fast, high-quality responses to customer inquiries. To do this, we need to not only meet our service level agreements (SLAs), but also provide informative, personalized, and empathetic responses. Additionally, we need to continuously analyze our processes and performance to identify pain points and areas for improvement, and adjust our efficiency on a daily basis to ensure that we are providing the best possible service to our customers. By prioritizing speed, quality, and continuous improvement, we can build trust and loyalty with our customers, which is crucial for long-term success.”

The next step in Thunes’ service transformation will be adopting more automation to drive productivity even further. Ultimately, the company seeks to deliver personalised and proactive customer service.

And it’s not difficult to understand why.

“Customers today expect businesses to deliver immersive experiences be it human-like artificial intelligence or conversational experiences made available on whichever channel of communication they choose. Businesses stand to benefit greatly by meeting these expectations as 63% of business leaders in the APAC region have already seen a positive ROI on their CX over the past 12 months. In addition, 72% expect to increase their CX budget over the next 12 months,” shared Yew Hwee Ng, Senior Vice President, Asia, Zendesk.

The Thunes’ case study is a great example of adopting the right strategy in putting employees and customers at the heart of everything they do. Thunes turned the challenge it faced into an opportunity to deliver great CX by implementing smart automations and leveraging data to increase agent productivity, save time and create meaningful interactions at every touchpoint. Given the benefits it has reaped, it will be exciting to watch what lies ahead for Thunes as the company continues on its journey of delivering exceptional and immersive experiences for its customers and employees.