Zai scales global operations with Salesforce

Whether you’re an individual sending money abroad or a company with complex domestic and international payments requirements, Zai makes moving money accessible, fast, efficient, and secure.

Already an important player on the European and Asia Pacific fintech stage, Zai is readying itself for major expansion in the UK and USA. Salesforce has been a long-time service provider for Zai’s sister brand, CurrencyFair and now the group’s second brand Zai is deepening its use of Salesforce.

Today, Zai is busy deploying the proven Salesforce solutions that have served CurrencyFair so well for a decade to its enterprise-grade, business-to-business offering. We spoke to Zai’s leaders in service, technology, and operations to find out why Salesforce remains fundamental to the next phase of development of this powerhouse group.

Salesforce has been the flexible, scalable, and connected growth engine that helped to establish CurrencyFair as one of the world’s most trusted cross-border payment and foreign exchange businesses. Founded in 2010, CurrencyFair offers individuals and small firms a fast, secure, and low-cost way to transfer funds anywhere in the world in over 20 currencies.

Although part of the new, merged company Zai, CurrencyFair’s business model and brand is well established and trusted by loyal customers across Asia, Europe, and the USA – as the group’s consumer and small business-facing operation.

Zai meanwhile is forging ahead with expansion from its Australian roots into new geographies, servicing mid-market businesses and larger enterprises – beginning with the UK. Zai’s expertise comes from its understanding of the complex and evolving mix of payments that need to be orchestrated on behalf of its business customers.

"Salesforce is deeply embedded within our business, and we see it making a major contribution to our expansion plans at Zai, leveraging the benefits it has delivered for CurrencyFair,” explained Phil O'Malley, Chief Technology Officer.

“Salesforce provides a unified view of all our customers, improves the customer experience through ongoing support, and uses the information gleaned through Salesforce to choreograph communications with customers about new features and service improvements.”

Salesforce provides the data and insights to improve the speed of customer onboarding, which is a key target for Zai that shortens time to revenue. “Salesforce helped CurrencyFair become a well-oiled machine – we’re confident it can have the same impact for Zai,” said O’Malley.

Alex Grabe has been with CurrencyFair since its days as a ground-breaking start-up, organising money transfers using telephone and email. A decade later, he’s the Salesforce platform’s strongest advocate. But it was during these early days that one of the company’s key differentiators was forged – a passionate commitment to great customer service.

Grabe took the successful delivery of a service for a customer personally. He would get to know them as individuals and find out who they were sending money to and why – whether it was for a birthday, Christmas, or to contribute to the family budget. “We cared about them and their families, and they became like friends,” explained Grabe, now Associate Director and Senior Solutions Manager.

“I discovered what these payments mean to people, and how important it is that they can trust us. It’s not a transaction to them, it’s a connection to home, to family and friends. It doesn’t matter if they’re transferring £50 or £1 million; at that moment they need to know it’s arrived safely. That’s driven my approach to service ever since – make it personal, build a rapport, and let them know you care.”

As the personal approach produced more and more customers, Grabe understood the need for a technology platform that can deliver consistent, personal services at scale. The company selected Service Cloud, which provided structure and certainty by capturing the history of each interaction with the customer and enabling customer requests to be shared equally amongst the team and targeted to the person best placed to respond.

“Salesforce has been a key component in our ability to handle growth and scale,” explained Grabe. “With an omnichannel approach, we’re handling tens of thousands of customer requests a month and we’re capturing information in Salesforce from every email and every telephone call to inform our next conversation. Everything is connected in Salesforce, there’s no duplication, and everyone has the up-to-date picture. Customers don’t have to repeat themselves every time; we can proactively reach out to them to show that we care and want to help.”

Building on the success of Service Cloud, over the years CurrencyFair has steadily expanded its use of Salesforce. “Salesforce is so flexible,” explained Grabe. “Take the Knowledge product for example. We can publish articles quickly and easily to help customers self-serve 24/7, as well as inform the customer service team members of new developments that in turn help them in their interactions with customers.”

Einstein chatbots are helping customers to find answers to basic questions, by directing them to helpful articles to perform basic troubleshooting tasks. For example, the need to clear a cache is a common problem and might take four or five emails with a customer service agent to diagnose and resolve.

Instead, the chatbot makes suggestions and directs customers to relevant articles with simple instructions. It records each step of the conversation so that if the problem isn’t resolved, agents know exactly what has been tried which makes diagnosis much easier. “This is a simple but highly efficient service that’s a great help for customers, especially when they need instant assistance – like late at night, for example,” explained Grabe. “It saves time and money too. It’s an efficiency engine!”

Salesforce is also helping eliminate difficult to diagnose problems, such as identifying when a customer may be having difficulties logging into their accounts when abroad.

Resolving this issue could routinely take multiple emails, but Salesforce analysis now flags activity outside the customer’s home country. This enables an agent to intervene directly, calling the customer at a convenient time and recognising time zone differences. Solving this at source saves up to €60,000 each year in agent time.

“There’s a wealth of behavioural data and insights captured by Salesforce which is valuable to apply and make improvements throughout the business,” said Grabe.

Showing care for customers comes in many forms. Service Cloud is synched with Marketing Cloud, and all service touchpoints with customers can inform marketing communications activities. This enables relevant, personalised conversations, tailored to the needs of each recipient and timed to arrive at the most helpful time, such as a reminder about an upcoming payment date.

The data also tells the company when not to communicate with a customer. “If a customer has a complaint, we need to handle that sensitively and appropriately,” said Grabe. “The native connection with Marketing Cloud means that it knows about the complaint residing in Service Cloud. It then automatically suppresses marketing emails that may irritate that customer, and then reinstates them when the complaint has been resolved. It may seem a small issue but being able to avoid frustrating the customer is just another way that Salesforce helps us in those moments.”

Tableau is also involved in this process, analysing customer behaviours and trends following a complaint. It also shares that information to mine relevant learning points and prompt service improvements.

The merger of CurrencyFair and Zai is a perfect marriage of opportunity, with the expertise of one business having direct relevance and value to the growth of the other.

Head of Operations Lorraine Pountney has a key role in ensuring the maintenance – and enhancement – of the great customer service that CurrencyFair is renowned for. “The merger provides many challenges and many opportunities. In many ways the two sides of the business are very different, with different customers. But when it comes to customer service, the philosophy is the same, so the challenge becomes one of alignment.

“Salesforce gives us a solid platform that enables the integration of both sides of the business and standardises our approach to all our customers. We use so much of Salesforce’s functionality within CurrencyFair – it’s the cornerstone of the business – and so it makes perfect sense to deploy all that internal expertise and support for the benefit of Zai. We anticipate the impact will be significant in the years to come.”

In today’s world, speed and accuracy are equally important. Customers want action quickly, but there are processes to complete along the way – not least to meet legal and regulatory requirements. Salesforce data and automation provides the ability and confidence for Zai to move at pace, track every step of the process, flag where actions are required, and confirm when they’ve been completed.

Pountney is currently managing the expansion of Zai’s operations to the UK. It’s a major undertaking but one that will provide complete visibility and extensive reporting capacity across the whole business.

“We like to make our customers feel special and always be available for them. This is an easy thing to say, but in our industry it’s one of our key strengths and a real differentiator,” said Pountney.

“For example, we have very high standards around response times. Eighty percent of our customers receive a response within two hours. We respond in Salesforce, we monitor and measure in Salesforce, we report in Salesforce, and we learn in Salesforce. Everything is in one place, for all to see, to act upon appropriately and successfully.”

It’s easy to conclude that the payments industry is a place driven by innovative technology, where human intervention is minimised. Zai provides the evidence that, in the end, all customers are people, who need to feel understood, valued, and nurtured.

Salesforce enables Zai to deliver on its passion for customer service in a technology-driven industry and take pride in making them feel special. “Technology shouldn’t replace personal service. On the contrary, Salesforce helps us enhance our service, through the power of data,” concluded Grabe.