Unpacking Neobanks for SMEs — Chapter 3
By: Terence Chong
Tags: Customer Experience, Challenger Banks, Fintech, Neobank, Customer Service

Chapter 3: Customer Support

A major factor in how applicants rate the onboarding process is the timely availability of customer support. Naturally, there will be multiple questions that need to be answered when filling out the digital form, and sometimes the FAQs don’t cut it. All the neobanks tout how customer experience is their primary focus but do they actually deliver on their promises? In this chapter, we will be comparing the customer support experiences of SME neobanks, diagnosing what makes one stand out.

It can’t be understated how important customer support is to a user’s experience. Any cursory look at review sites such as TrustPilot, AppGrooves or ProductHunt will show us that most neobank user reviews are about their customer support. For example, this review page on NorthOne contains many comments, positive and negative, about their customer support experience.

Reviews take effort to craft so the quality of customer support is a huge influence in shaping the user’s impression of the entire neobanking experience.

Here is a table of three main features pertaining to customer support: Availability, Medium and Average Reply Time. Medium refers to the different channels of customer support, eg. Phone, Live Chat, Email etc. Average Reply Time is defined as the average of how long the neobanks’ customer support took to get back to our repeated queries on Live Chat or Email (if the former is not available), the two most prevalent support channels. Because we took the average of a small sample size, the actual reply times might vary in the real world.

Creating a quality customer support at a glance

Arival’s customer support comparison led us to 3 main insights about what constitutes great customer support.

We will be going through these points in detail, so sit tight folks.

#1 Forms of Customer Support

One thing that we really noticed when we were testing the customer support of the neobanks was that any absence of a responsive Live Chat feature was sorely felt, possibly because our younger generation relies on communication channels that mimic text messaging like Live Chat. To most users, Live Chat feels like a much more intuitive and personable way to communicate. Fortunately, most of the neobanks have Live Chat messaging.

Chatting with NorthOne

Chatting with Aspire

According to this 4,000 person survey by LivePerson, upwards of 75% of Gen Z and Millennials prefer text messaging as the main form of communication. By 2025, millennials will comprise three-quarters of the global workforce, so catering to their communication preferences will be a neobank priority.

So where does that leave the ones without Live Chat, like Neat, Transferwise and Penta? As you can imagine, emails require a longer wait for a reply compared to Live Chat. Consequently, having Live Chat customer support gives the impression that the neobank is invested in providing responsive and quality customer service. On the flip side, not having one imprints upon the user a feeling that customer support via email will take more time to reach.

Neobanks that pride themselves on delivering a better user experience MUST have at least a Live Chat widget/feature to communicate with users.

#2 Available 24/7

Although our small sample size may not be indicative of other people’s experiences, we find that neobanks with 24/7 customer support are much more responsive on average. Revolut Business and Bankera reply almost instantly when we messaged them. It is a significant investment to have a 24/7 customer support centre, so the fact that their agents are extremely responsive only goes to show their level of commitment to the issue. They deserve a round of applause.

We should also note that Revolut Business and Bankera’s ability (look back at Chapter 1) to onboard global clients incentivize them to provide 24/7 support since many of their clients engage in cross-border transfers.

Many of us have experienced the painful lack of 24/7 support in most traditional banks when we discovered some issue with our bank statements late at night, only to realize we couldn’t call the bank because it was outside working hours. We neobanks should be doing better than our traditional counterparts! Having a 24/7 support that is responsive goes a long way in cementing a reputation of being a customer-centric banking provider, especially compared to the legacy banking players.

#3 Personability of Customer Support

We’ve already expressed our undying love for using Live Chat as a customer support channel. However, compared to over the phone, conversing over Live Chat tends to be less personable. Customer service agents can make things worse by replying with a copied response from the FAQ page, making the experience feel like a conversation with an automated bot. Such an impersonal experience will be less likely over the phone as you actually hear the agent’s voice and they are forced to listen to you and tailor their response based on your query.

Here are screenshots of an actual conversation with a customer service agent from Wise. As you can gather from the short conversation, the agent does not seem to be directly answering the question at hand. Instead, they repeatedly replied with answers copied directly from the FAQ, making the interactions feel scripted and mechanical, and providing a dim view of how much the neobank values engaging their customers.

This is an example of a poor customer support experience. Customer support agents should endeavour to be as personable as possible. To illustrate how important this is, here are some key statistics taken from HubSpot.

90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. 49% of American consumers switched companies last year due to poor customer service. It takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience.

If a Wise user were to encounter such an impersonal experience, it would be very likely that the person would consider switching to another neobank account. There is no shortage of competitors in the space, and no excuse for having a customer support that is not personable, not engaging or seem like they don’t care.

Agents can create a more enjoyable and memorable experience when they use their personal voice. Here’s an example of such a conversation with Revolut’s customer support.

Would you rather converse with Wise’s or Revolut’s customer service agent? The answer is obvious. When talking to Revolut’s agent, we felt a sense of genuine concern from her. It was like a conversation with an empathising friend. That should be the minimum standard all neobanks’ customer support teams.

Conclusion

Customer support is an integral part of the entire user experience. Although we have expanded on the key points of the forms of customer support and the personability, the main crux of the matter still inevitably boils down to two things: Availability and Quality.

In that regard, we would like to highlight Mercury as having of of the poorest customer support experiences despite offering the best onboarding experience (recall in Chapter 2). After opening an account with Mercury, we tried interacting with their customer support via Live Chat. They were very unresponsive, taking days to reply to our queries, averaging out to a 2 days reply time. We checked Mercury’s TrustPilot review page, only to find out this was not an isolated incident. Many others have experienced similar issues.

This level of customer support falls short of reasonable expectations. In today’s digital world where users expect quick responses, taking days to reply to queries is extremely detrimental to user retention and loyalty. Mercury has to find a way to reply to customer queries in a prompt manner. The business of running a SME can be incredibly stressful, and any transaction errors or technical issues with the bank account incur additional stress. It is up to neobanks, like Mercury and Arival, to alleviate that stress, not add to it.

Whilst having a world-class customer service may not make the entire user experience, a negative one will leave a bad impression, no matter the flawless UI design or the extensiveness of its integrations. It would be a shame to not invest in a reliable customer support infrastructure by including Live Chat, auditing the CS agent reply quality, and stressing the importance of minimizing reply times, if the other core parts of the user experience are sound.

It’s time for neobanks to put their customer support where their mouths are and step it up.