Trading 212 is a fintech innovator and a commission-free investment platform enabling everyone to invest and build wealth. And with over 14,000,000 mobile app downloads, it’s also one of the most popular trading apps in the world.
For years, they have been democratizing financial markets with smart, free, and easy-to-use apps by offering the first zero-commission stock trading service in the UK and Europe.
With more than 1.5 million clients onboard, providing excellent customer service can turn into a Herculean task — one Trading 212 definitely know how to handle.
We talked to Anton Valchev, their Head of Client Relations, and Kristiyan Borisov, Customer Care Supervisor, to learn their secrets of success as well as Kaizo’s part in the journey.
Kaizo for Trading 212 in 5 seconds
Excellent customer service is what helps companies rise above their competitors, parade their strengths in front of their potential customers.
Trading 212 have already claimed their place in the sun with the exemplary service they provide to their clients and the outstanding attention they pay to their issues.
By choosing Kaizo, they invest in the development of their teams, which, in the end, has a positive impact on the overall business outcomes.
On a mission to disrupt the stock brokerage industry
“Enable everyone to build wealth”
That’s where Trading 212’s story started back in 2003.
They had one simple idea guiding the way: making financial markets accessible to anyone. And it is through advanced technology and prime-quality user experience that they managed to make that mission a reality.
Their ambition, however, went even further than that: they aimed to become the biggest broker in the UK and Europe, leading the frontline of every technological wave in the industry.
And this is where Trading 212 is now, being the #1 trading app in the UK since 2016 for millions of people to enjoy easy access to financial markets.
So here’s more on their story.
We’ve outgrown you, Spreadsheets!
Hypergrowth means having to face the challenges of rapid change. Trading 212 experienced that when their team’s size increased by more than 200%.
After all, there is a point where Spreadsheets can do more damage than good, tangling processes instead of getting them organized.
To properly handle the increasing client demand while further elevating customer experience, Trading 212 went looking for something better suited for their needs:
“Although we were doing a good job, we wanted to take it to a higher level. To do so, we reorganized our QA process entirely. Our old methods wouldn’t work for this. The search for an alternative led us to Kaizo.”
Anton Valchev, Head of Client Relations at Trading 212
18 months of growth on all counts
Continuous customer service excellence requires a systematic approach, one where you identify key areas and improve them all at the same time. In simple terms, this means that focusing on QA alone is not enough to properly develop your teams — there’s much more to that science.
But Trading 212 know all the things that guarantee growth, and they apply their lessons learnt to get better results every day.
Kaizo was an integral part of the reshaping process, thanks to which within only 18 months Trading 212 saw their CSAT increase by 9%, growing from 84% to a whopping 93%.
Here’s how they got there.
Guiding teams with Performance Coaching
Customer support teams need constant guidance and training not just to nail all processes, but to secure their own career growth prospects.
Coaching a large team, however, can be a tedious endeavor, especially if you are distracted by a multitude of tools and need to jump from one Spreadsheet to another.
With Kaizo’s help, Trading 212 always have data-driven insights at their fingertips and are able to make strategic decisions. Using Team House for Performance Coaching, they rely on historical performance data to identify learning opportunities and create Coaching Cards for their agents. These cards have already made their feedback sessions into an easy, consistent, and continuous process.
“Knowing precisely where to focus is always beneficial for career advancement. Kaizo’s streamlined process helped us develop many of our team members. As a result, their professional expertise increased and many of them were promoted to different roles or departments.”
Anton Valchev, Head of Client Relations at Trading 212
Challenging Agents with Missions
In customer service, motivation goes a long way. Setting SMART goals and empowering agents to reach them is one sure way to enable continuous company growth.
Kaizo’s Mission Center helps you set goals where it’s easy to follow up on the team’s progress. Missions give insight into KPI goals, send you real-time alerts, and notifications.
And for Trading 212, the new alert system has proved extremely beneficial when spotting cases where an agent is not meeting a set criterion, e.g. Customer Satisfaction Rate, Number of Handled Tickets/Chats, Handled Tickets per hour, etc.
Reinventing Quality Assurance
When Trading 212 discovered Kaizo, they had also just embarked on a journey to upgrade their QA. They launched an internal QA department that would be responsible for monitoring agent performance and providing regular feedback to all team members.
“By customizing our own evaluation criteria via Kaizo, we optimized the communication between the QA experts and our chat/email agents. This helped us in reducing the number of bad reviews and eliminating some patterns that were preventing us from reaching the CSAT level we’re aiming for.”
Anton Valchev, Head of Client Relations at Trading 212
Final thoughts
Trading 212 have gone a long way to get their customer support department to where it is now. But if one thing is clear it’s this: they are always able to identify areas for improvement and develop working strategies for tackling them.
In this story, Kaizo has proudly played a part in automating and simplifying processes that used to add too much hassle and confusion. The Trading 212 team no longer has to waste time trying to understand what sheet holds valuable performance information and how they can use that data to bring about improved results.
And that’s what efficiency is all about!
