Consolidating all of our information into one system has helped us communicate better internally and, for the customer, has resulted in a better experience.
Charles GrechChief Operating Officer, Truevo
The number of shoppers using e-commerce in the UK increased from just over one billion in 2014 to an eye-watering 2.4 billion in 2021, according to Statista. Understandably, this has left businesses scrambling to find a fast, flexible, and secure way to allow customers to make payments online.
One business successfully stepping up to this challenge is Truevo. Truevo is a multinational fintech company that designs user-friendly payment solutions for entrepreneurs. With Truevo, small business owners can accept payments across all channels (online, in-store, in-app, over the phone), in any format (Visa, Mastercard, Google Pay, Apple Pay) – and in over 150 currencies.
The way Truevo handles transactions also allows it to speed up card payouts. This means businesses can settle refunds, wages, and reimbursements almost instantly.
Truevo began as a mobile point-of-sale product seller in 2014 called Swish. In 2017, the company realised its ambition of becoming an e-commerce acquirer and rebranded as Truevo (a contraction of True Evolution). This was a signal of its missions – to change how businesses interact with payments…forever.
It was at that critical point in the company’s history that then Chief Operating Officer, Charles Grech started looking for ways to consolidate Truevo’s operations:
“We had a number of systems that were quite good at what they did, individually. But with a different tool for each task, every department ended up seeing only fragmented parts of the whole picture. We needed a tool that would bring it all together.”
In this blog, we explore how Grech and his team used Salesforce to manage how it supports e-commerce merchants.
Truevo was using different tools for onboarding, customer support, customer communication and pipeline management. This caused the business one major issue – its teams were working in silos.
But by switching to a single platform that consolidated its team’s knowledge of the customer helped provide what Grech calls ‘critical context’. “Salesforce is the underlying platform for how we define the customer experience across different value chains.”
For example, Truevo’s customer success team used to keep manual lists or hold on-the-fly conversations with the sales or accounts team to decide how to best support its customers and merchants or determine which team would reach out to the customer. .
Now, the team uses Service Cloud to set flags, indicators and classification systems that guide how it delivers recommendations. These readings then determine whether an automated response would be best or if a member of the team should reach out directly. But most importantly, it also helps inform which team member (account manager, partner manager, sales manager) would be best placed to handle the support case. “The result of having that data means the right person reaches out, which of course, makes our service a much more pleasurable experience.”
Context doesn’t just help Truevo with the day-to-day tasks. It helps the payments provider become a better partner to the merchants they serve, even as they grow.
At the contract renegotiation stage, for example, if a customer would like to process more volume, Truevo’s account team can take a quick peek into the merchant’s activity and use the data to inform recommendations. “We look at the challenges they’ve raised, the queries that we’ve received, and the tickets they’ve raised to get an idea of their general sentiment and use that data to decide how we communicate with the merchant and select what additional terms we might be able to offer them.”
It has also helped Grech make improvements to how Truevo operates, like deciding where automation might be needed or where staffing should be increased.
For example, Truevo has metrics to healthcheck each phase of its customers development path (from initial qualification stage to going live). This not only helps Truevo surface and diagnose problems with its processes early, but means it can also use the data collected to improve its timeline prediction for other customers going forward.
“It helps us get ahead of what might become problems or find areas that might need to be optimised or find opportunities to further improve our service.”
As a financial institution, Truevo is duty bound to protect customer data and provide a safe payment environment for everyone involved. To secure that data within the Salesforce environment, Truevo uses Salesforce Shield.
Having comprehensive security for critical data allows Truevo to protect sensitive information at scale, and to monitor and act on unauthorised activity. “It gives us peace of mind knowing that it's going to be much harder for any malicious third-party to try and lay their hands on our data.”
Having a security solution in place also allows Truevo to navigate compliance and industry regulations that come with being a multinational fintech business. “It makes it possible for us to keep a detailed audit log and provide satisfactory answers to regulatory bodies and auditing parties when required.”
Truevo now has total visibility into its environment and is able to establish checks and balances that track every change on a customer record. This means it can reconstruct a historical state, at any point in time.
Truevo has used Salesforce to consolidate its operations and provide exceptional support to its merchants. Having all departments working on one platform has equipped its various teams to become better running partners to the entrepreneurs they support and position themselves as a leader in the fintech industry. Overall, it has reduced the need to simultaneously use five different systems and improved productivity on customer value chains by circa 25%.
So, what’s next for the company? “There's a lot of untapped functionality that we could still benefit from in the longer term with Salesforce. We’re working on setting up bespoke flows and onboarding journeys – something that will empower our business users to be able to carry out more complex configurations, customisations, and workflows without the need for any technical coding allowing payments to flow.. After all, our mission continues to be Simply better Payments Entrepreneurs.”
