Customer Experience: Our top focus even in the time of COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rattle industries, it's more important than ever for business leaders to ensure the well-being of their employees. We at Pine Labs had been monitoring the COVID-19 situation from close quarters and the sheer magnitude of this global pandemic is unprecedented. Thanks to our proactive monitoring of the Coronavirus-related developments in the world, we picked the cues early that a nation-wide lockdown was not far from being a reality in India. In these distressful times, as a new age fintech company, it is our responsibility to make this transition period much easier and smoother for our customers and the general people at large. We activated a cross-functional Emergency Response team and were quick to act on our Business Continuity Plan (BCP) once the 21-day national lockdown was announced on 24^thMarch 2020.

While for some departments it was much simple to implement Work from Home (WFH), it was quite a challenge to think of an alternate for the customer service teams. Our strong team of 150 call center agents needed access to telephone infrastructure, mission critical software such as Transaction Monitoring Flow and Payment Controller. All these were critical in their day-to-day functioning and for them to resolve customer problems.

Our initial assessments were right that the COVID-19 issue will persist for some time and it was not a matter of just few days or weeks. We immediately sourced laptops for our agents to enable remote access. We are glad that our technology team was able to come up with a timely solution and helped to set up systems to enable connectivity for all within 48 hours. This swift and decisive move led to our entire organisation including customer support team migrating to a work from home environment, much prior to the official announcement of the 21-day lockdown in the country.

Our call center team is now extensively leveraging technological tools like VPN, team collaboration tools, video and audio-conferencing tools like Zoom and Webex with even in-person merchant meetings now being handled virtually. We have made sure that our customer experience is top-notch even during this lockdown period. Our merchant partners can now leave a miss call on our toll-free number and the customer support representative would call them within two hours and resolve the situation. We have also put in place a strong Escalation Matrix to ensure any customer grievance is being addressed to the satisfaction of our merchants.

As the world grappled with the dramatic and sudden turn of events, we made sure that we were finding opportunities during this turbulent phase. I feel that businesses which have the right attitude to problem-solving will weather any storm and will sustain through the current crisis as well. We managed to convert this crisis into an opportunity by introducing an economical payment acceptance option in the form of ePOS by Pine Labs, an Android mobile payment application to help merchants accept contactless payment modes lie UPI and mobile wallets during this COVID-19 outbreak. ePOS by Pine Labs has emerged as a win-win for us and our merchants as it helps save cost and add more merchants to the digital payment ecosystem. Our recently launched Go Green initiative across all customer touchpoints helps do away with printed chargeslips and instead promotes the eco-friendly alternate of digital or e-chargeslips. Earlier this year, Pine Labs also launched Paper PoS, a single merged static QR code that gave the option to customers to pay using Bharat QR or UPI through the scan of a single QR code. These are just few examples. We will continue to evolve and adjust to the changing world around us and keep the bar high for our customers, come what may!