Lydia cuts response time & makes customers happier

Lydia’s Support team reduced their response time from 13 hours to 5 hours, with up to 70% of their users receiving a reply in less than 1 hour.

Lydia is a mobile payment app used widely in France with over 6 million downloads. Beyond peer-to-peer (P2P) payment, the app allows users to monitor their bank accounts, make bank transfers, and create shared accounts, among other things. Since 2019, Lydia has more than doubled their headcount, growing from 138 to over 350 employees. At the start, Front was first rolled out to manage customer communications but has since scaled to become a critical collaboration tool across departments.

Challenge

Lydia is growing quickly, adding an average of 4,000 users a day. Because of this rapid acceleration in growth, which began at the beginning of 2020, coinciding with a large B-series funding round, the company also accelerated hiring. As a result, processes that worked early in the company’s growth were no longer able to keep up.

Prior to Front, Lydia relied on Zendesk for all customer support services and used Slack to ping teammates for help and for case escalation. But as a pure ticket management software, Zendesk was limiting. And while Slack worked for some communication, it made it hard to escalate emails and tickets to other teammates. The Lydia team needed a solution to easily share emails for collaboration, quickly escalate cases, and get help from other teammates in a timely manner.

Solution

Lydia knew that for customers to trust them with managing their finances, they needed to prioritize customer relationships through fast and efficient responses. Now, Front serves as the backbone of Lydia’s communications. Over 350 teammates across five teams use Front as part of their daily workflow, which has allowed them to dramatically increase their customer satisfaction rate and boost their KPI metrics. As the company grew, so did the need for efficient internal collaboration. Front enabled effective interdepartmental connections, solving Lydia’s problems such as delayed conversations due to growing pains.

Lydia streamlines message management

The team uses Front’s shared inboxes for every inbound message (about 80,000 per month). Using Front’s rules feature, messages are auto-tagged based on email address. Then, using Front’s API, additional tags are auto-added based on the content of the email. A final manual review for emails that don’t fall into the standard categories allows teammates to add any other necessary tags. This allows the team to prioritize messages and address urgent issues immediately.

Guillaume Poirier, VP of Customer Care at Lydia, explains the main benefit of auto-tagging by saying, “We save a lot of time using rules and auto-tagging over having to look at every message and manually add the tags we need.”

Message templates + Text Expander = time savings

Another timesaver has been the way the Lydia team uses Front’s native message templates feature in combination with TextExpander. The team has created over 2,700 message templates based on an analysis of their message history, allowing them to send very specific, relevant responses that are further customized using TextExpander snippets. This process has significantly sped up the time it takes teammates to compose a message without losing the personal feeling they want to prioritize as a brand. That’s especially important when customers increasingly depend on them to help manage their finances.

Further speeding up this process is the creation of standardized decision trees for each category of message. Pulling up the relevant decision tree allows a teammate to quickly determine the action that needs to be taken and ensure that every customer receives a consistent experience.

Front enables and accelerates collaboration — even while remote

Front’s collaboration features that replaced Lydia’s old Slack communication method have proven invaluable to the team. Poirier, who leads the Support and Know Your Customer (KYC) teams says, “What we want customers to come away with is confidence that their issue will be addressed quickly and completely. Using Front, we’re able to speedily communicate both within our individual teams and with our operations and tech teams when issues need to be escalated. This has allowed us to solve issues much faster and improve our response time, leading to a customer satisfaction rating of 93%. We’re proud that we can keep our customers happy at scale.”

Even after the team has transitioned to remote work, they haven’t missed a beat. Poirier says that’s thanks to the solid communication processes they’ve set up that have allowed them to continue working smoothly from anywhere.

Lydia reduces response time by more than 2X since they started with Front

Poirier’s team had a goal of improving their response time to customer messages as part of boosting customer satisfaction. When the Customer Support team first started using Front in 2019, their average response time was 13 hours. Today, they’ve improved it to be on average 5 hours. With Front’s analytics, they have gained visibility that they can serve 70% of their 6 million users within 1 hour.

Poirier checks Front’s analytics at least once a day, sometimes more. He’s excited about the improvements his team has been able to achieve using Front. By leveraging Front’s integrations including an API connecting NiceReply, the team continues to track quality and speed metrics and seek feedback from customers via surveys, prioritizing customer relationships built on trust. Poirier says, “My team is happy to work with a tool that’s so efficient and helps them perform at a much higher level. And it has a great UX that makes it easy to use.”