During the pandemic and its difficult economic wake, Fintech was one of the few sectors with substantial growth: digital transactions rose by 13% after the first lockdowns, with widespread rollouts of mobile banking applications by traditional brick-and-mortar banking services.
Two years on from the pandemic, the fintech market is showing a maturing customer base with rising abandonment rates due to poor customer service and onboarding, and entrenched consumer trust issues resulting from mismanaged cryptocurrency exchanges, such as FTX.
The customer service problem, arguably, is that many fintech businesses – and specifically those within the crypto & foreign exchange (forex or FX) sector – are still operating from the old playbook of invasive questions and long forms in the pursuit of know-your-customer (KYC) compliance, but with little thought for first-time user experience.
As recent news demonstrates, KYC and more – not less – regulatory compliance is essential for a friendly and profitable trading environment. However, as seen in similar maturing sectors, this pursuit within crypto & FX must be paired with an extremely thoughtful, efficient and trustworthy customer experience.
Crypto has a customer service (and trust) problem
Cryptocurrency trading is a complicated field with millions of data points and trillions of dollars in transaction value. It is also, by its nature, a multinational and multilingual business that requires both retail and institutional traders to cope with language barriers and timezone service delays.
When trades are worth thousands or even millions, the idea of a technical support request being lost in translation is untenable. As a result, cryptocurrency businesses are following in the steps of foreign exchanges in operating expensive manual contact centres with native-speaking agents recruited from around the world.
However, this is an imperfect solution, as agent turnover & training problems and expanding customer volumes lead to inevitable wait times and poor customer satisfaction rates. Also, many new cryptocurrency businesses do not have sufficient resources for multilingual customer service at their outset, which is a significant barrier to growth.
But beyond customer service, the ultimate barrier to growth across big and small crypto businesses is consumer trust. Retail investors have seen their holdings vanish with industry bad-apples and one-time behemoths, like OneCoin and FTX. So even the most rigid and exhaustive onboarding and KYC processes are no longer a guarantee of trust.
Solutions for efficient customer service, such as CX automation platforms, also offer an answer to this trust question.
The promise of CX automation for crypto and FX customers
In contrast to the nascent use of AI for customer service, AI trading bots are big business with $5 trillion moving every day in part, via AI automations for analysing markets and executing trades for institutional traders – with the promise of major rewards from minimal effort.
Of course, this automation does not always work, as trading bots are restricted by their programming and the data at their disposal. In many cases, such bots have performed well when trading in demo environments using decades of historical data, but then failed in the real world when met with more elastic data.
The deployment of trading bots is maturing however, with the combination of automated and manual strategies leading to an increasing rate of 38% of crypto traders using bots
This early application of AI to backend trading is evolving, but it does open the door to frontend opportunities, such as CX automation for solving the customer service and trust problems.
Smart deployment of customer service automation can include chatbots to immediately answer frequent trading questions across languages and timezones with no translation problems nor wait times. Most important for scalability, these chatbots can also smoothen the onboarding process with user-friendly KYC questions in a conversational format, and deliver proactive tips at key blockers.
Customer chatbots can also be integrated with back-office systems to incentivise loyal traders with cross-channel promotional offers.
Providing this personalized and thoughtful service via chatbots has the power to differentiate crypto brands as not only user-friendly – but also provide meaningful touchpoints that indicate a trustworthy and customer-centric business.
The Proto difference for customer trust
While multilingual chatbots offer an opportunity for improvements to customer service and trust, not all chatbot vendors are built for this journey.
Businesses familiar with chatbots will know that customer service automation within crypto and FX requires iterative dialogue design strategies, localized natural language processing (NLP) models, and deep-knowledge of regulatory requirements. CX teams need additional automation such as livechat features, omnichannel case tracking, and analytics to make the most of these solutions.
Proto is a unique CX automation platform given its extensive service of central banks from the Philippines to Rwanda to Ghana, securities & exchange commissions, and departments of trade & industry across multiple consumer protection use-cases that facilitated over 2 million customer complaints about financial service providers so far in 2022.
This scale of regulatory alignment and localized NLP capability for languages such as Kinyarwanda, Tagalog and Twi is made possible for Proto’s proLocal™ engine, which speaks over 100 under-resourced and mixed languages. Proto's CX platform also offers native integrations with messaging apps such as Telegram, LINE and Viber for maximum customer access and trust-building touchpoints.
While CX automation from the most capable vendors can solve customer service pain points and contribute to renewed consumer trust, cryptocurrency businesses in particular need to pair this effort with additional investments in meaningful regulatory engagement.
To learn more about how Proto can help, book a product tour with our experts today.
