Our Customer Success team is doing an amazing job. On average, a user will receive a response within two hours and an answer to their problem within 24 hours. This level of support is for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year (366 for leap years). Our inquiry rate is also at an all time low with only 1.4% of BitPay invoices needing any help from our Customer Success team.

We’re not satisfied with these numbers and are working to push them even lower because we care about our customers and want to provide the best customer service possible. Unfortunately, we failed to provide the best customer service in 2017. Our old strategy could not keep up with Bitcoin’s meteoric growth in 2017.

The Unofficial Title for our Head of Customer Success

BitPay was riding the wave just along with everyone else, providing excellent service when activity was low but unable to meet expectations as transaction activity rose exponentially. To be a leader in the space we needed a new strategy that would allow for support with dependable metrics regardless of the price. We needed to adopt a stronger and more scalable foundation for Customer Success.

BitPay Support v.1.0

Originally, customer success was largely handled by every member of BitPay. That included designers, developers, marketers, and even our CEO. Why did we do it this way?

We wanted every member of the company to experience the customer journey. With those pain points in mind, our designers could design more user-friendly products, our developers could prioritize changes that would most help our users, and marketing could write content geared towards helping our users. This worked well until Bitcoin’s price grew 1500% along with new people using the cryptocurrency (a jump from around 4 million to 30 million users). The old model failed so we needed a radical change and a serious upgrade.

A Radical Change: Payment Protocol

At the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, we adopted Payment Protocol (BIP70) as our standard for paying a BitPay invoice. With our error rates now at 0.27%, Payment Protocol has proven to be the best way to deal with screwed up payments. You can check out the graph to see the impact Payment Protocol has had:

Credit cards and debit cards always do exact payment so you never have to worry about paying too much or too little. With cash, you can mistakenly pay too much or too little. Thankfully, the cashier is usually able to spot the mistake and sort it out before the purchase is made.

Because Bitcoin works like cash and funds are sent within seconds, it’s easy for those mistakes to happen without anyone noticing. That means the business doesn’t get what they asked for and the customer doesn’t get what they paid for. So, with the adoption of Payment Protocol, BitPay is able to reject and refund payments that are too big, too small, or take too long to arrive.

With Payment Protocol, BitPay makes sure that you’re sending the correct amount within BitPay’s 15 minute time-frame. This helps push error rates closer to zero which, combined with our low rates, allow businesses to complete purchases at a lower cost than VISA and Mastercard.

Even if fees are low and refunds are automatic, these payment errors are problems for merchants and customers. It’s like a declined credit card transaction. You’re forced to try again, try something else, or give up on buying what you wanted. And these problems cost: they cost both merchants and consumers a successful purchase. You can see how drastically lower the dollar value of payment errors was in June 2018 compared to June 2017 (before we adopted Payment Protocol):

BitPay Support v.2.0

We seriously upgraded our Customer Success team by growing it 500%. With many more hands on deck, we quickly worked through BitPay’s backlog of support emails and brought our response and resolution times down to an industry leading level.

BitPay’s Customer Success Team Hard at Work

The goal of the new and improved Customer Success Team is to provide success for our users at every step of their journey using BitPay. They are working with Sales Engineering to take over the setup and day-to-day operations of merchant accounts. They are working with our developers to expand their technical knowledge and ability to answer basic development questions. They are working with Marketing to help make BitPay a positive addition to our users’ brands.

By working both internally with the BitPay team and externally with our users, the Customer Success team allows all the members of our company to focus on their primary goals (development, marketing, sales, etc.) while making sure everyone at BitPay maintains a customer oriented focus.

This new team structure will help make sure BitPay is not overwhelmed with support requests like we were in 2017, regardless of what the future brings.

The Path Forward

Currently, BitPay’s Customer Success team is launching four initiatives:

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): They handle the trickier problems that our customers have, maintain our help articles and documentation, and train the team to better understand their specific expertise (BitPay Card, BitPay Wallet, etc.). Customer Success Engineers (CSEs): They will directly reach out to new BitPay accounts and help them get setup, answer questions, and show them all the resources available. They will be tour guides for BitPay’s payment processing platform. Customer Success Managers (CSMs): They will have a similar role to our CSEs, but will focus on identifying trends, looking for root causes to issues, implementing improved business processes, gathering feedback for feature requests and and enhancements for BitPay’s products. Support Form: Our users can expect frequent updates to BitPay’s support form going forward. The ultimate goal for the support form is to provide real time answers for common questions along with access to the merchant dashboard and the ability to pre-populate some form information.

With a robust, multi-dimensional team and these initiatives that are being launched, BitPay is positioned to continue improving the experience our users have with all of our products. Customer success is essential for the future of cryptocurrency. That means it will remain essential for BitPay both now and into the future.

Have questions about Payment Protocol? Check out our Payment Protocol FAQ page!

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