Helio:
Hi and welcome to the CX Coffee Chat, I’m your host for today. My name is Helio Sassioto and I’m here with Rafael. Rafael Lichtenecker, correct me if I’m wrong, Rafael. But let me introduce myself first. I’m Head of Sales here at Concentrix and today we are here with Rafael, Director of Operations Customer Experience, Risk and Fraud at Nomad.
Hi, Rafael, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Could you please introduce yourself to our audience?
Rafael:
Sure, absolutely. First of all, thanks for the invitation. I’m Rafa Lichtenecker as said, I’m the Director of Operations, Customer Experience and Fraud Prevention at NOMAD. I look forward to our discussion and I hope the audience enjoys our conversation.
Helio:
Great, great. Thank you. Thank you, Rafa. Now, let’s start with the first question. Can you share with us your journey that has led you to the current role at Nomad?
Rafael:
Yes. So my background has always been in products and in fraud. I’ve always enjoyed working in the world of fintechs and startups. In 2011, I worked at Groupon for eight years.
My last position was head of fraud prevention and payments for Latin America at Groupon. I had my first experience of working outside Brazil in Chile. From then, I migrated to the product area at Mercado Pago. After that, I’ve worked in the payment cross-border industry. And before coming to Nomad, I was head of risk and fraud for Latin America at Sumup in 2020.
In July 2021, I received a LinkedIn message from Lucas Vargas, CTO of Nomad, talking about Nomad’s recent Series A funding and inviting me to have a chat. And that’s how it all began. We chatted for a while, then he introduced me to Gabriel Pinto, Nomad’s CEO and co-founder. And three months later, they completely sold me the idea of joining Nomad’s team. For those who don’t know, Nomad is a Brazilian fintech that offers opening of an international account and an international debit card to use in more than 180 countries and the possibility of making investments in the US market in addition to other financial services and products in the US for Brazilians.
Helio:
That’s great. That’s great. And as the Director of Operations, Customer Experience and Risk and Fraud, what are your primary responsibilities at Nomad, Rafa?
Rafael:
Great. So I think the main responsibilities are 100 % oriented towards offering our customers a delightful and effective customer experience. I’d also like to say that it’s my role to work to stay at the same pace with the growth of the business, which is very challenging. It’s also my role and the team’s role to provide an experience of excellence, whether in operations or on fraud, reducing friction and the need to contact customer service, whether in our help center, FAQ or our self-service tool.
If I can add one last responsibility, it’s to work to resolve operations demands at scale with quality and efficiency.
Helio:
Cool, cool. That’s great. Thank you. What are some of key initiatives or projects you’ve led that have significantly impacted Nomad?
Rafael:
I think the first significant project for me was working on a project called Instant Onboarding. Basically, at the time in 2021, our client took 30 hours to open an account with Nomad.
And together with our product team, we worked with our providers and partners to reduce this time to 10 minutes. So in a nutshell, more than 90 % of our accounts are open today within 10 minutes. Another important initiative was to reduce our backlog. Nomad grew very, very quickly. When I arrived, we had 100 ,000 Nomads accounts.
Today we have more than 2 million accounts. So we had a huge backlog with this disproportionate growth. And based on a series of initiatives, we brought that backlog to zero. Today our backlog is around 50 tickets, very, very healthy. The average waiting time for our customers to be attended to is two minutes. Almost 80 % of our customers have their problems resolved within 30 minutes.
And more than 90 % of our customers are answered within 45 seconds when they reach out to us by phone. So fortunately, this is important thing, fraud has never been a big problem at Nomad. We have always worked below 10 BPS of chargeback as a percentage of our total process volume by card. Well, that was significantly. Thank you.
Helio:
And how do you ensure operational efficiency and effectiveness in a dynamic and growing company like Nomad?
Rafael:
So, Helio, I think the first step is to instill a data-driven mindset in the team. So, in other words, to be clear about the main operations indicators. Here I’m talking about first response SLA, with your resolution SLA, CSAT, NPS, average handling time, percentage of tickets correctly classified, chargeback rate, agent’s quality score, et cetera. The second is to work pretty close to the technology, business, and product team. So Nomad is structured into business units. So we have investment, US accounts, international payments, travel, et cetera. And for each business unit, I have an operation leader who is part of the rituals and ceremonies of these teams. The third is to understand how AI tools can help us improve the resolution and efficiency of the operations team. And the fourth is to take a careful look at the contact rate. What are our main pain points for business units? What do they need to tackle?
So with this exponential growth like Nomad, this indicator can’t go up. And we work very carefully to ensure the correct classification of the tickets in order to prioritize the right tasks within the company.
Helio:
That’s great, that’s great. Thanks again, Rafa. I’ve got another one. What strategies do you use to ensure an exceptional customer experience at Nomad?
Rafael:
Good question. So the first thing I believe is to have an engaged and constantly developing operations team. So in Nomad, we work with OKRs. And one of our objectives here in operations is to have a very good internal NPS from the leaders in our directorship. So in other words, on a scale of one to 10, how likely are the analysts, supervisors, coordinators, and managers in our team to recommend their respective leaders? If we don’t have good leaders, we won’t achieve good results.
So paraphrasing an author that I really like, leaders are not responsible for the results of the organizations. They are responsible for the people who achieve those results. And in addition to this, we put a huge amount of effort into the quality of servicing. It’s not just a matter of looking at the CSAT at the NPS, but of carefully assessing whether the agent has provided good service.
We have a team focused on this. And beside that, is to monitor the resolution time when a customer reaches out to us. It doesn’t make sense in having an exceptional. Now, first reply, if it takes us a long time to solve the problem.
Helio:
That’s a great benchmark, thanks. And what proactive measures do you take to mitigate risk and prevent fraud in your operations, Rafa?
Rafael:
So, Helio I like to say that one of Nomad’s best decisions was to have our anti-fraud operations team working the same team. So you have no idea how important it is to have our service agent working closer to risk. Speaking specifically about proactive measures, we have several alerts, whether onboarding or transactionals, to detect suspicious behavior. To give a practical example, when a customer’s cell phone is stolen, we have some alerts and rules to prevent the fraudsters from misappropriating this money. We also have a solid product team that works specifically on fraud prevention and is constantly thinking about this new protections in the app in our onboarding and also developing models to grant greater ascertainess in fraud detection, mitigating false positives. I think basically that’s how we can be always anticipating the fraud. Great, great, great, great. And how do you foster a customer-centric culture within your teams at Nomad? So I really like to answer these questions.
So within Nomad’s strategic plan, we have a pillar that talks about experience. And we have specific goals focused on customer experience. We have also disseminated topics on customer experience in our weekly all-hands. And every month, we send the company an operational report by business unit with the main objective to give visibility of our operational indicators and broaden our understanding of tickets, their origin, causes and intentions, adding action plans for the evolution of indicators. That’s how we can foster this customer centric culture within our team in Nomad.
Helio:
And that’s great. Are there any specific tools or technologies that you… that have significantly improved your operations and CX strategies at Nomad, Rafa?
Rafael:
Definitely. At Nomad, we have our own back office, which is constantly evolving. So having a robust back-office ensures more autonomy and efficiency in the agent’s response. We are also automating some process within the team where, depending on a specific subject, we automate the response to our client. Furthermore, we are improving the tools that monitor the scale, productivity and quality of agents. And of course, we are using AI tools such as Copilot to improve the average service time of our customer service and testing large language model solutions to refine the self-service we have today.
Helio:
Great, great. I’ve got a couple other questions here.
What trends do you see shaping the future of the digital nomad and remote work industry? And how is Nomad preparing to stay ahead of these trends, Rafa?
Rafael:
So, Helio, I’ll try to keep this question as brief as possible because I don’t like to be futuristic.
Helio:
Okay, okay.
Rafael:
But I understand that our economy is becoming increasingly globalized and keeping part of our assets in strong currency such as dollar is inevitable. So I believe that in this scenario Nomad is definitely the best solution we have. So I firmly believe in our mission. So basically a little bit about how I can see the future trend in a nutshell. I understand that passing the days, understand that our economy is becoming globalized and we need to keep it part of our assets in dollars.
Helio:
Great, great. And the last one, what advice would you give to aspiring professionals who aim to excel in operations, CX and or risk management?
Rafael:
So, it sounds it sounds silly, but always be ready to learn. So when I joined Nomad, my knowledge of customer experience was like minimal. I must have spoken to at least 30 professionals much better than me to understand how things work. And I also think it’s important to be very close to AI technologies. So we are definitely not talking about hype. AI is there to automate process such as chargeback disputes in our antifraud or solve the majority of customer questions and complaints. So the role of customer service as well as other professions is going to change. And the leaders who understand this and are already working on this movement are the ones who will do the best.
Helio:
Great, great, Rafa. It was inspiring. Thank you, Rafa, for joining us today. And thank you all for listening. This was the CX Coffee Chat Thank you. Thank you, Rafa.
Rafael:
Thank you very much.
