How trading platform Pepperstone uses automation to enhance CX

Financial trading platform Pepperstone integrates automation into its customer experience processes to not only give customers what they want but bringing internal efficiencies.

Tim Williams, chief customer experience officer at digital trading platform Pepperstone explained to Digital Nation at the Salesforce World Tour Essentials in Melbourne how it blended automation into its customer experience.

Williams said there are always going to be things Pepperstone can’t fix at source or customers need guidance in making a decision, but they don’t want to speak to a human.

“That is where the automation piece comes in, how do you enable them to find the answers themselves? Do you build a better knowledge base, do you build a better search capability within that knowledge base? Do you build a chatbot that answers the questions?” he said.

“Do you put help in the product so that they don't even have to leave the product to find the answers that they want? That is a big part of that automation piece.”

Williams added, “The benefits you get from doing that, for the customer experience is great because you're giving customers what they want. But there's also that flow and benefit to freeing up resources for more important things.”

He said automation frees up his staff's time to focus on delivering more important projects.

“They've now got time to deal with the higher order issues that need problem-solving so customers are better able to access that resource and access those people in a quicker way,” he explained.

Automating simple tasks means Williams and his team can retain knowledge about complex processes and concepts.

“It's easy for [my staff] because they can better remember the training and practising those skills more often and more regularly,” he said.

“It's better customer experience because they're getting someone who remembers their training, they remember what they're doing and they were able to get onto them quickly.”

When choosing what Pepperstone wanted to automate, Williams said it all came down to data. The main problem the platform has was trying to automate the work accumulated on the weekend.

“What were we getting on a weekend and what we found was it was almost all live chat. Chatbots becomes an easier answer. Don't try and push [the customers] somewhere else, they're all going to live chat, build a solution in live chat,” he said.

“Then it was about they're going to live chat anyway, what are they doing on live chat and what are those things on live chat you then automate?”

Pepperstone also sought to automate its email processes through ChatGPT.

“Thirty percent of our traffic is email, we know customers don't like using email, but for some reason, they aren't like how do you make that experience better?” he said.

“One of the things I'm excited about with ChatGPT is to use the smarts of ChatGPT to get that email to the right team in the first place. Use better SLA counters so it doesn't reset every time it gets kicked along the customer service line. But ideally, it doesn't get kicked along, it gets to the right person, the first time.”

Williams explained they will then use ChatGPT to auto-suggest responses.

“Instead of a finance person having to spend ages writing an email, they can say yep, that's the right response, hit send, summarise their notes and they are good to go,” he ended.

Athina Mallis travelled to Salesforce World Tour Essentials in Melbourne as a guest of Salesforce.