Global fintech Mercuryo moves to Zendesk for a “pillar of operations”

Mercuryo is an international fintech company that specializes in cryptocurrency payment solutions, while providing businesses in web3 and fiat worlds with a wide range of financial services. The company’s core product enables global users to buy and sell crypto quickly and easily within a single application.

Today, Mercuryo powers more than 200 apps and serves some of the industry’s largest players, from different niches within web3, such as wallets, exchanges, neobanks, and more.

These major names include MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger, and Bybit. The B2B2C company maintains strong customer relationships by providing excellent transactional and product support to merchants, partners, and end users.

Crypto users move at lightning speed

As Mercuryo strives to stand out from competitors, the conversation often revolves around delivering a fast-paced customer experience. “People are used to doing everything in the crypto world at lightning speed,” says Phil Andrews, Head of Customer Operations. “One of the advantages is that blockchain technology makes things super-quick, immutable, and very reliable. I could make a crypto payment to the United States in a matter of seconds, rather than days.”

Now that such rapid payments are possible, finance customers also expect an immediate response from the company’s customer support team. That poses a challenge for Mercuryo’s remote workforce, which is distributed across 35 countries.

Customer Operations has met the demand and seen a dramatic improvement in response times by leveraging the Zendesk Suite Professional for ticketing, help center, and voice support.

“We use a variety of self-service features such as the help center and bots to address easier queries. Then we have agents available 24/7 to work on more complex queries,” Andrews explains.

First response times once ranged from 2.5 to 4 minutes and now clock in around 30 to 60 seconds. The Zendesk solution has enabled faster and more effective resolutions, bringing Mercuryo closer to providing a truly differentiated customer experience for customers.

Roadblocks to growth with Intercom

When Andrews joined Mercuryo in 2023, he observed that their existing CX tool, Intercom, was insufficient to meet the company’s future business goals. While the chat functionality worked well, Intercom did not organize conversations in an easily accessible way, which created disorder and inefficiency as agents ended up repeating tasks.

“We wanted to make the operations side really efficient, but our previous system wasn’t fit for that purpose,” recalls Andrews. “If we couldn’t scale operations and make the back end tidy, we were never going to improve the customer experience. It was slowing us down and holding us back.”

Intercom created another roadblock to growth by limiting Mercuryo’s ability to gather the data needed to measure usage and improve productivity. They wanted to understand why customers were contacting support and see the data at a high level, but the pre-built dashboards in Intercom were not easy to customize.

Won over by cost savings and flexibility

To get the team back on track, Andrews shortlisted 10 support tools that offered the best features and fit for Mercuryo, including Zendesk, Intercom, and Dixa. He managed to sell senior leadership on Zendesk by demonstrating the platform’s extensibility.

“Zendesk gives us more depth in almost all areas of our tooling, particularly triggers and complex automations, so we can get more done,” says Andrews. “There’s so much I can do in Zendesk and I have the scope to build onto it in the future, rather than be limited by the tool.”

His evaluation also showed that “Zendesk was significantly more competitively priced over three years than Intercom would be. We could have more functionality and it was going to cost less, so the decision to switch was a no brainer.” The projected savings on agent licensing was the cherry on top for Mercuryo. “Zendesk gave us a lot more flexibility with Light Agents, whereas it was costing us a lot of money with Intercom to give people access that never actually used the tool.”

“Zendesk as the pillar of operations”

After nearly five years leveraging Intercom, the company transitioned to using Zendesk for CX in late 2023 and began creating a unified workspace for cross-functional collaboration.

“We very much see Zendesk as the pillar of operations now, because we can customize it to fit our needs in many different ways,” shares Andrews. “Zendesk is not just a customer service tool. We’ve started bringing multiple teams into Zendesk, including customer operations, KYC and onboarding, customer success, fraud operations, and finance. By having all of them in one place, we don’t need extra tools that slow down the process.”

Customer Operations had previously run into issues working with teams that used Jira, because the Intercom-Jira integration didn’t give them control over ticket assignments, which was necessary for a 24/7 global support team.

Consolidating workflows in Zendesk offered a better solution and helped drive operational efficiency. “We moved several internal teams from Jira to Zendesk, which has allowed us to have a more seamless experience. We believe part of our CSAT improvement was due to better resolutions and smoother internal processes,” says Andrews.

In fact, Mercuryo customer satisfaction scores used to hover around 83 to 85 percent, and they now average between 86 to 90 percent with Zendesk.

A smoother agent experience

Using Zendesk makes daily tasks easier for Mercuryo agents and allows them to focus more on customer interactions rather than dealing with clunky systems.

“We built a custom app within Zendesk for our own admin panel, which makes life better on the agent side. We couldn’t do that easily with Intercom,” says Andrews. His team also migrated the company’s internal knowledge base to Zendesk, so agents don’t need to leave the system to check reference documents or standard operating procedures (SOPs), resulting in smoother workflows.

Communication and routing is now more efficient than ever. “Integrations with Side Conversations have enabled a better agent experience, especially for ticket escalations. Managers can respond quicker and more easily in Slack, resulting in faster resolutions for our customers,” he adds.

Ensuring quality and customer satisfaction

After years working in regulated financial services, Andrews has adjusted his approach to “the Wild West” of cryptocurrency, where there’s less regulation and oversight. “Everybody loves that we’re super quick. But we still want a set of operating procedures and a way of doing quality assurance on our customer service to ensure that we prioritize giving customers the right information throughout their onboarding, payment, and support experience.” To get the job done, Mercuryo leverages Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus).

“We look at first response time, CSAT, and quality, and use that data to frame everything we do, whether it’s process efficiencies or product improvements,” he says. “Based on customer feedback, we see a real correlation between how quickly customers can get a hold of us and get a resolution, and their customer satisfaction.”

Great CX data drives improvement

This year, Andrews is focused on surfacing Zendesk insights to other teams to create a positive feedback loop that improves the product and the customer experience.

“With Zendesk, we can build more granular reports and dashboards and cross-reference data more easily,” he says. “Now that we’re able to add custom fields to tickets along with the flexibility in macros, triggers, and automations, we can accurately report on reasons for contact, and feed that information back to our product and engineering teams.”

Zendesk reporting has allowed Mercuryo to better understand what customers need from the CX team, and how the business can continue optimizing procedures to increase customer satisfaction. That data-driven approach also allows Andrews to demonstrate his team’s role in keeping customers happy and driving future growth.

“We may not be a traditional revenue-generating team, like customer success or sales. However, we can attach a value to support operations, because we have data that shows how many customers contacted support and how many return customers we had within the 30 days after their experience.”