Qonto, an idea born of frustration!

The 2 co-founders of Qonto, Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi, had an unsatisfactory banking experience during their first entrepreneurial venture. Time-consuming and dusty, the service provided did not meet the expectations of a modern business.
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To save time, they decided in 2017 to create their own solution to meet their needs. Their goal? To invent the best all-in-one business account for SMEs, accelerated by technology, clarified by design and accessible at the fairest price.

‍With €622m raised and over 350,000 business customers, Qonto is the first online business account to be accredited as a payment institution and is part of the French Tech Next40.

Helping Penta's German customers make the transition to Qonto by outsourcing its customer service 

2022 marked an important stage in Qonto's growth. The neo-bank made its first acquisition since its creation by acquiring German competitor Penta, Germany's leading digital business financing solution for SMEs, sole traders and the self-employed. This acquisition will enable it to extend its presence in 4 markets: France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

When Qonto called on Onepilot at the end of November 2022, the stakes and scope of intervention were clear. The customer service teams in Germany had to be scaled up quickly to help Penta's 50,000 customers migrate seamlessly to Qonto. 

"It took a lot of resources to help Penta customers make the transition to Qonto, in a market where we have historically been small. We needed to expand our customer service in a very short space of time, with tasks very specific to the migration and at a speed never seen before with Qonto! It was a very challenging project for both Qonto and Onepilot," explains Minh Hai LE, Senior Strategic Operations Manager at Qonto.

As a result, 100 Onepilot agents were onboarded on this project in 6 weeks, including more than 60 full-time agents today. 

To provide Penta customers with the best support during this transition, Qonto has split its customer service activities and divided its agents into 4 scopes:

1st scope: Customer onboarding. Staffed by agents who all speak German and English, this service supports customers from 9am to 7pm, with the option of extending hours to avoid backlogs.

 "As the market was small to begin with, it was important to have contacts who also spoke English to facilitate coordination with the central Qonto teams. The agents handle tasks in BO and take care of some customers via chat and email," explains Minh Hai.

2nd scope: Traditional customer service with incoming requests on a 9am to 7pm coverage. It is made up of Onepilot agents who respond via chat, email and phone.

3rd scope: Outbound calls. The agents assigned to this scope will proactively call customers to help them migrate to Qonto. Coveraging being 9am to 7pm.

4th scope: Penta. This service is dedicated solely to managing the end of migration for Penta customers and generally generates a large volume of tickets to be processed. The agents in this scope only use Penta's historical management tools, processes and working methods, so as not to complicate their tasks by adding those of Qonto.

Outside the 4th scope, agents use Intercom for customer relationship management via chat and email, Mayday for the knowledge base Diabolocom for calls.

Ambitious KPIs for monitoring customer service performance 

"Our results are good, bearing in mind that we have very high target metrics overall at Qonto. We had a CSAT of around 4.4 when we migrated, and we're now aiming for 4.7, which is almost unrivalled in the fintech or banking sectors. Stellar Customer Support is really one of Qonto's strategic pillars, and we are gradually achieving our targets with a set-up that works well with Onepilot," explains Minh Hai.

Other closely watched metrics include? First Response Time, which is now 3 minutes for chat and 15 minutes for email. "We set ourselves demanding targets with Onepilot for the Penta migration of 2 minutes for chat and 30 minutes maximum for email, so we're almost there for the chat part! As for our reopen rate, it's very good at 6%.

What sets Onepilot apart from other outsourced customer service providers?

For Minh Hai, it's undoubtedly the flexibility and speed with which agents can be scaled.

"We clearly can't recruit and train agents as quickly with other service providers.

The tech DNA of Onepilot, a hyper-growth start-up, means that there is more flexibility and speed of execution in the service compared with more traditional incumbents who could not accept such a rapid increase in the number of agents in such a short space of time.”

The quality of the agents is also a highlight. As proof of this, we managed to scale our management structure by training the Onepilot agents ourselves, who were very good at becoming team leads. And there are some real success stories in this project... Most of our very first agents have become team leads and now manage 10 to 20 agents.

As a little anecdote, the name of my team is 'scalability', which reflects the ambition of the project: we went from 3 to 60 full-time equivalent agents in record time!

The final word from Minh Hai LE

"The migration project was very complex to implement on the Qonto side, as we were building the product flows at the same time as migrating the customers themselves, as well as other related projects. So changing everything from one day to the next wasn't easy for either Qonto or Onepilot. We had to find the right management structure to ensure that the agents were properly guided through the constant changes in context and processes. But thanks to the flexibility and speed of the Onepilot teams, and given the conditions, we can say that the gamble paid off!”

Finally, I'd like to thank Julian Greutter, who was our main point of contact on the operations side at Onepilot. The team in Germany really adapted their way of working so that we could find a Qonto/Onepilot in-between. We managed to get the teams to work on less stable scopes and still achieve good results".

Don't wait until you are overwhelmed with requests! Like Qonto, trust Onepilot to outsource your customer support. Onepilot offers you a fast, flexible and easy-to-implement solution to quickly scale your teams. We guarantee 100% human and qualitative answers managed by our native agents. Contact us now for a demo here.

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