The Four Pillars of Customer Service at Nubank

Nubank was created as a customer-centric startup. So much so that one of our values is, “We want our customers to love us fanatically.”

As a technology company, we want to deliver simple, practical products that enable people to solve problems without contacting us. However, if they do need to talk to us, it is our mission to WOW them in every interaction. 

This goal permeates everything we do. In previous posts, I have already mentioned how much customer focus is connected to our culture, the way we structure our teams, and the way we work to exceed expectations always. 

But I still needed to share an essential part of this process: how we make sure our teams are aligned.  

Over the last months, we’ve been working hard to refine some of our practices, and we got to four pillars that guide our customer excellence team, the Xpeers: Anticipate, Solve, Care, and Empower. 

Here I will briefly share with you how we got to these four principles and how they help us in practice. 

What makes excellent customer service?

At the end of 2019, we started to work out our team strategy for the next few years. Despite already having lots of guides and instructions in place, we decided we needed to create our quality standards – and since our area is Customer Excellence, we decided to call them Excellence Standards. 

Considering our standards must reflect what our customers would like to have when they interact with us, it is only fair that we start our process by listening to… our customers. 

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Listening to our customers 

The first step was to survey a sample of our customers and potential customers. We talked to people from different age groups, regions of the country, and income brackets to determine what they value most in the customer service of a company like Nubank.

Based on that survey, we came to three critical points for the customers: 

1. They want to have their questions answered or receiving information quickly.
2. They want to be sure the person on the other side understood the problem correctly.
3. They want to know the company cares about the stress the customer may be going through due to the reported situation.

Listening to our teams

With these insights about the customers’ perspective, we set out to carry out a series of focus group surveys inside Nubank. We brought together customer service members but also product managers, business architects, business analysts, engineers… 

The goal? To gather expertise and perspectives from different areas to manage to refine all the information we collected from our customers and prioritize it. 

It was by doing so that we got to the four pillars of customer service at Nubank, listed in order of priority:

1. Anticipate: We anticipate potential customer needs and use the information to give them the best possible support. 
2. Solve: We respond in a timely fashion; we seek to solve any difficulties in the first contact.
3. Care: We practice empathy in every interaction; we go beyond to offer the best experience; we always act to put our customers’ safety first. 
4. Empower: We make the process transparent for the customer; we work to eliminate information noise; we help the customer solve their problems with autonomy if they wish to do so. 

How it works in practice

With these four points, our Xpeers have more clarity about what they need to prioritize when they are talking to a customer. 

When someone contacts us asking about a denied purchase, for instance, the first step is to understand the entire picture. Is there any bill unpaid? Is there any password mistake? The idea is to anticipate situations the customer might not have seen. 

Then, we set out to solve it as soon as possible. 

All this with care, empathy, and thinking about how we can turn this contact into the best possible experience. Finally, we try to empower the customer so that they know how to deal with that situation in the future with autonomy, when possible. 

This methodology helps us in several ways:

• We ensure our customer service is more consistent.
• We manage to explain customer service goals to new members of our team more directly and clearly. 
• We empower people to make decisions quickly (they have clear priorities).
•  And, most importantly, that methodology helps us keep focusing on what matters most: the customer. 

What about you? Have you ever thought about the priorities of those who contact your company? Doing this exercise may help ensure you are WOWing your customers – be them a few dozen or a few million.