Customer Operations: The beating heart of every business

Gone are the days of microphone headsets, call centres and generic automated responses. Customer Operations (COps) has become vital to championing and representing the customer at every step in TotallyMoney’s growth. And, members of our COps team explain why you should position your customer-facing team at the forefront of your business.

How a customer is treated when they interact with a business is what they’ll remember and is a major factor in whether they return. Customers expect good service, and there’s never a reason they shouldn’t get it.

At TotallyMoney, our COps team is at the heart of our business, because our customers are at the heart of everything we do.

Being the voice of TotallyMoney, we’re the personality that our customers get to interact with, so it’s crucial we deliver high-quality and efficient responses and get this right every time. We want our customers to know that we care about them and the problems they’re facing. So, we make sure our communications are always personalised and relevant.

Consideration, care and empathy go a long way in enhancing the customer experience — that’s why they form the basis of our communication and procedure. We believe this makes all the difference to our customers, many of whom may be down on their luck. 

Customers receive lots of different types of emails from TotallyMoney, so COps works closely with the marketing and commercial teams to suggest ideas for new messages based on what our customers are saying. 

Being the only customer-facing team, COps is closely involved with every team in the company. That way we’re involved in product changes and marketing schedules, where we can offer key customer insights to ensure customer-centricity at all times. For example, before TotallyMoney released Credit Assistant, we were involved with testing — meaning we could highlight areas customers may find confusing or unclear. This allowed the team to redesign the feature to make it easier to understand.

The perspective and learnings that COps take from customer interactions are invaluable for the business. They allow us to play a key role in making sure that everything we build is done with a strong understanding of what is right for our customers. 

As new features are released and the product continues to grow, we need more avenues to receive high-quality insights from customers. That’s where your customer-facing team must be the voice of the customer before, during, and after release.

For us, that involves sharing feedback with the relevant cross-functional squads. We have regular meetings with our product design team to develop and maintain a functional feedback loop — one that ensures the customer is always at the forefront of our decisions.

How do we get these insights? On top of our day-to-day correspondence with customers over email, COps manages the reviews received on Trustpilot, the App Store and Google Play Store, as well as the comments and messages that come in via social media. 

We share our interactions and findings with the entire company each month, which highlights the trends we’ve uncovered, or any specific pain points. We also get together with the product design team each month so we can raise these bigger issues directly with them. This is a seamless process, where issues customers face are fixed much faster, which shows how valuable COps insights are to the app. 

It’s important that every company differentiates itself from competitors now more than ever. The service given by your customer-facing team is the perfect opportunity to do just that. 

Many of your competitors might provide a similar product to you, but only with a satisfactory customer experience. That’s where going above and beyond to delight — not just satisfy — your customers makes a profound difference. It's why so far this year, nearly half of customers who’ve emailed us have heard back within thirty minutes, and 85% of customers have rated their interaction with us as Excellent or Good. 

Not only that, we responded to all our negative Trustpilot reviews, because we genuinely value what our customers say — good or bad. Your customer-facing team are your most prominent brand representatives; just one good interaction with them can create a memorable experience that helps keep the customer stay loyal to you.