Remittances are a multibillion-dollar economy you’ve probably never considered.
According to the World Bank, emigrants from low- and middle-income countries sent over $669 billion back to their home countries in 2023, up 3.8% from the year before. For many people on the receiving end of those transfers, remittances are a vital lifeline. Even as some economies depend in large part on the inflow of cash sent from expatriates (remittances contribute up to 48% of GDP in Tajikistan), most overseas workers still only eke out a meager wage.
For poor migrants sending what precious spare income they have to even poorer families back home, there’s a lot at stake, which is why trust is so important to the companies facilitating those transactions.
“It’s super important to understand how hard it is to build trust with our customer base because of how complex remittances are,” Matt Oppenheimer, CEO of Remitly, a Seattle-based online remittance service, told me last week.
Remitly, Oppenheimer says, has tackled the challenge of building trust in large part through investing in customer service and embedding it in the corporate culture. And that culture is driven from the top down. Customer focus was one of Remitly’s founding principles, and Oppenheimer says when he visits Remitly’s customer service centers, he takes the chance to jump on a phone, personally fielding calls from customers.
“I’m taking those calls because I love interacting with customers,” Oppenheimer says. “And those stories stick with me for years to come, in terms of issues that customers face when I answered the call, and what we did to resolve it.”
That’s the front line, where Remitly wins—or salvages—customer trust.
“When a customer calls us in disarray because there’s been a delay in their payment, how well we treat customers in that instance is, I think, very much how we differentiate ourselves,” Oppenheimer says.
I interviewed Oppenheimer for a case study on how brands can better manage customer service operations to build trust.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In your latest letter to shareholders, you said that the single most important cultural value at Remitly is “customer centricity.” Why is that?
When we started the company, the three cofounders got together and said, “Hey, what kind of culture do we want to create?” in our company. I still have photos of the whiteboard from that initial meeting, and what’s interesting is that while some of the values we wrote there have changed and evolved, customer centricity has been there from the very start. By rooting ourselves in our customers, that’s given us our purpose and meaning, which permeates everything.
Our business starts and ends with our customers, and that obviously creates a lot of value for our team and for our shareholders. But what’s unique about Remitly is just who our customers are and the sacrifices they make—oftentimes leaving close family members and loved ones behind to move to a new country, to build a better life for themselves and their families back home. Yet they’ve historically just not had access to financial services that naturalized citizens have.
How have you internalized “customer centricity” as a core value in your company culture?
Well, the first market we served was the Philippines, and that’s where our first office was. Back then, something like 10% of the country’s GDP was made up of remittances and so most of our customer service agents there had a direct connection to remittances. [Editor’s note: According to the Philippines’ central bank, remittances made 9% of GDP in 2022.] We were hiring local. And our customers loved that because we could provide service in Tagalog as well as English and offer empathy and understanding for why if, for example, some funds are delayed. It’s an urgent issue.
Obviously our operations have expanded beyond the Philippines, and we have seven different customer service sites. But, at the same time, we strategically picked where we wanted to have sites [so they’re closer to our user base] because I think that makes it easier to instill that customer centricity.
So you’re actively recruiting customer service agents with similar backgrounds to your customers’. What else?
I think that culture kind of starts at the top. I regularly visit our various sites, and one of the things that I am most looking forward to is taking customer calls. And I do it out on the floor with everybody. And it’s not like I’m taking them because of the fact that everybody’s watching. I’m taking them because I love interacting with customers and their stories stick with me for years afterwards, in terms of issues customers face and what we did to resolve those problems.
We also have a, sort of, systematic version of focus groups with our customer service agents, where we listen, learn, and act on what they are telling us about our customer needs, because they’re the closest to them. And I think our agents feel empowered therefore to speak up on behalf of customers to where it creates this positive loop of us not only improving our product but empowering our agents to speak up, which helps us continue to identify pain points that we can then improve.
What sort of empowerment do you give your customer service workers to resolve customer complaints on their own?
There’s different levels of authorization to make different decisions in our customer service teams, obviously. If you go back to the idea of trust, a part of that for us is maintaining trust with our regulators. There are a lot of areas that require systems and processes and controls to be in place. But I think our agents feel empowered to speak up on behalf of customers, and that’s matched with our Voice of Customer and Voice of Associate processes [i.e. gathering feedback from customers and employees].
I’m really grateful for those teams in terms of how they listen both qualitatively and quantitatively to associate feedback, and then triage to make sure that information is getting to the right product teams, which can actually automate and solve some of the problems that they’re identifying.
Do you use chatbots in your customer service operations?
We have erred on the side of having an actual person who someone can actually talk to. I think we make it easy to get to a human and speak with them. And we offer it in different languages, obviously.
I do think that AI and chatbots are going to get better and could serve as almost like a copilot for a real agent, if done in the right way. But there’s a lot of security and privacy components to that, too, that really need to be thought through.
Many companies see relying on human phone operators as an undue cost. How do you justify the expense?
I view it as an investment in the trusted relationship we have with customers. Our customers send very regularly back to their families at home, and they’ll send with a provider that they feel like they can trust, and that they have a relationship with. So if we have a phenomenal experience with a customer—one where even if there’s been a delay in the transaction, we treat them well and we give them peace of mind that they feel taken care of—then I view that as us keeping a relationship rather than making a transaction, and that’s why it’s less of a cost component.
I do think that most people don’t wake up saying, “I want to contact customer support.” They usually have to do it when there’s an issue and not an automated solution to that issue. So I think the biggest thing that we can do to improve costs is prevent that contact from happening in the first place. And I think that is the biggest systematic way to both improve the customer experience and then, secondarily, save costs.
Looking to the year ahead, is there anything that you want to change or improve about how Remitly manages customer trust?
I think the biggest opportunity we have, especially with our scale, is the ability to continue to drive down the actual need to contact customer support by automating more and more of the actual product. That’s hard to do in financial services, and in international payments, because there’s so much complexity and regulation. So that would be the first one that comes to mind.
The second is, I think we can invest more in our in-house customer relations management tools—improving both the interface that our customers use but also things like dynamic routing—so you’re giving the more complex cases to more senior or experienced agents, and you’re giving the more basic cases to newer agents, so that we ramp up their understanding of the complexities of the service that we deliver.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
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