The Results
Spiral scanned through 2 years of Remitly customer support conversations* and detected issues affecting customers, allowing Remitly to address them with new products and improvements to existing solutions.
Remitly had an internal estimate on contact volume driven by unidentified* customers about cash pickup. Spiral determined that, in fact, the actual number was 3x higher, which prompted Remitly to create three different solutions. On this single issue, Remitly experienced significant cost savings by acting quickly on Spiral’s findings.
Spiral has discovered more than 200 issues across 20 major categories after processing the total volume of conversations from Remitly’s customers and agents. Most of the insights found have been used by Remitly to identify the root causes of discovered problems, fix them, and track the customer impact with Spiral to make sure the same issues don’t recur
The Story
About Remitly
Remitly is a leading digital financial services provider for immigrants and their families in over 135 countries around the world. Its vision is to transform the lives of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial services on the planet. Through its cross-border remittances, Remitly helps immigrants send money internationally with complete peace of mind by eliminating the long wait times, complexities and fees typical of traditional remittance processes. Remitly is headquartered in Seattle and has offices around the world, including London, Kraków, Manila and Managua. For more information, visit Remitly.com.
Overview
Remitly's disbursement network provides customers with a choice of delivery method and enables them to send (or pay-out) funds within minutes, to more than 3.5 billion bank accounts, over 630 million mobile wallets, and over 355,000 cash pickup locations (including retail outlets and banks) across more than 125 countries. With so many geographies and partners, customer problems can vary widely and it becomes cumbersome to sift through all customer support conversations* to find the key issues affecting users the most.
Previous Solution: Sifting Through Customer Conversations Manually
To reduce friction while sending money, Remitly prioritizes its customers’ experiences and treats their voice as the ground truth for company priorities. Remitly works hard to put in place the best possible mechanisms for customer service agents so that they can not only assist customers but also report issues with the product. However, every product is dynamic and issues experienced by customers change over time. Relying on manual human analysis and labeling of conversations proved to be error-prone and time-consuming.
Remitly needed a solution that could dynamically adapt to the volume of customer conversations and identify problems the moment they arise. Spiral took in Remitly’s customer support conversations* on a continuous basis and started scanning them for patterns and root causes of issues. Using AI for this challenge helped to eliminate human error as well as proved to be more consistent, precise, and dynamic.
Modern Solution: Getting Up-To-Date Customer-Facing Issues Using Spiral
After onboarding onto Spiral, Remitly went from manually analyzing a portion of conversations to automatically scanning 100% of their conversations using AI, which gave them new insights to inform product improvements.
“Spiral sifted through 2 years of our customer service conversations and provided a list with key problems Remitly’s customers were experiencing at that point in time.” – Jenny Waters, Senior Manager.
Moreover, Spiral quantified what percent of customers were experiencing each issue, making it easy for Remitly to prioritize and address them. Now Spiral scans Remitly’s customer support data daily and stays on top of any emerging issues. An average customer-agent conversation length is 29 messages and given the scale of our customer base, the sheer volume of messages would be infeasible for a human to analyze by hand.
Cash Pickup
Prior to Spiral
Spiral has helped Remitly find and solve more than 200 customer issues. One such issue involved the core transfer method Remitly offers: cash pickup. When a Remitly customer sends money to a loved one, the recipient may choose to pick up the money as cash in case the recipient doesn't have a bank account or simply prefers to have cash on hand.
Over the years, Remitly’s customer support has been receiving questions around cash pickup but it was hard to estimate the size of the problem. Agents were doing their best to address the needs of each unidentified customer when they called about trouble with pickup, but Remitly sought to enact a proactive solution that would make both parties’ lives easier. Customers are considered “unidentified” when they contact Remitly and don’t provide any identity info (e.g. the contact was the recipient of a money transfer and not the sender who initiated the transfer through their Remitly account). Due to their ongoing commitment to security, Remitly has had a policy of not disclosing information to unidentified customers, making it understandably difficult to satisfy recipients with these questions.
Using Spiral
Remitly began using Spiral’s services by providing the Spiral team with their Salesforce Live Agent customer support online chats daily.
Spiral brings along a 3-step process to help companies navigate through complex customer experience problems:
At Spiral we apply ‘Discover, Solve, Verify’ to all issues, big or small, in order to ensure quality in our process.
“Using Spiral, we were able to review top themes & verbatims from our chat data and identified that we had a gap in serving the recipients of the money transfers our customers are sending. This resulted in a focused approach to create recipient-centered content. We are also using the insights from the Spiral to help identify use cases to improve transparency for transaction status.”
- Jenny Waters, Senior Manager, Remitly
Discover - Solve - Verify
Discover
cash pickup issue
Spiral provided Remitly with a Sight AI dashboard that enabled them to conduct issue discovery of customer-facing problems. Spiral displays a list with the top 50 most important AI-discovered issues for the company by scanning their customer support channels.
In Remitly’s case, Spiral discovered several reasons why customers were having problems with cash pickup. “Spiral always aims to provide the fullest issue description to give us a jump-start on solving it.” - Jenny Waters, Senior Manager, Remitly. Moreover, Spiral provides customer verbatims that correspond to discovered issues. This section is used to understand the true customer pain points by reading a few relevant customer-agent conversations.
Remitly has been using Spiral daily to discover top weekly and daily issues.
“Problems discovered by Spiral are usually used by product managers, executives, analysts, content creators, marketers, and customer service managers at Remitly to create roadmaps and prioritize new and existing issues. Conveniently, Spiral sorts issues in order of importance based on how fast issues escalate.”
- Jenny Waters, Senior Manager, Remitly
After a few weeks of using Spiral, it became clear that questions surrounding cash pickup were resulting in a major stream of customer conversations. Spiral discovered that the actual conversation volume was 3x higher than Remitly had originally thought, helping them to confirm the impact of the issue on customers.
Solve
cash pickup issue
Remitly’s cash pickup challenge was clear – recipients couldn’t check their transfer status unless they had an account, resulting in many customer service contacts that couldn’t be resolved due to Remitly’s rule of not disclosing any transaction information to unidentified customers.
As a truly customer-centric company, Remitly decided to implement both short-term and long-term solutions to address the issue once and for all.
