Credit reinvented. For San Francisco-based Affirm, financial freedom is about saying “yes” to the things that will make your life easier, more fulfilling, and more fun.
Affirm is changing the world of credit to make it more honest and friendly, giving consumers the flexibility to buy now and pay later without hidden fees or compounding interest. This underlying sense of customer empowerment and transparency is what differentiates their brand from traditional creditors and others in their space.
“Our team’s mission is to be relentless in the pursuit of delighting customers,” says Jessie Reed, Manager of the Social Care and Community Team at Affirm. “Our team is responsible for enabling business growth through continually delivering improved performance; diagnosing and resolving sensitive consumer interactions; retaining our customers and building a community of engaged users across our customer network.”
In Affirm’s view, reinventing how credit is done not only includes game-changing financial services like microloan approval at checkout and flexible payment options, but also exemplary customer experiences – something that has been traditionally lacking in the credit industry. In order to ensure their products and services track with customer expectations, the team uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system.
“We started using NPS to gauge our customer’s overall experience with our service and whether their experience warranted their desire to recommend us to their friends and families. NPS is also another way to keep us in check with our company’s core values and learn from our customers on what we’re doing right and wrong.”
Delighted NPS has been Affirm’s tool of choice for collecting and managing these important insights. “Affirm has been using Delighted since 2014. Prior to NPS, we did not have a system in place to gauge this data. Apart from anecdotal interviews, we did not have a consistent and reliable source from which we could learn and grow,” says Reed.
By delivering NPS surveys via email, Affirm collects and reviews an impressive 600 pieces of feedback weekly – all with the intent of using this intelligence to make improvements to their products and services.
For Affirm, learning and growing means using the insights collected with Delighted NPS to improve their products and services.
“Affirm sought to really know how and why our customers use the product in order to understand the gaps in our products and services and to keep us in check with our values. NPS has helped identify improvements we could make to our product and enhance the customer experience, including billing reminders, payment process, checkout experience, and updates to FAQS.”
For Reed’s team, measuring the success of their customer experience program is predicated around the ability to collect and review in-depth NPS scores and open-ended responses provided by customers.
Reed emphasizes how the open-ended feedback that follows the NPS rating can make impactful organizational changes: “With our other review platforms, it can be a guessing game of who is behind the review and the circumstances that led to their feedback. The great thing about NPS in Delighted is that it allows us to track our customers specifically. Just by one person providing that verbatim comment, we can dive deeper into what went wrong and try to fix issues that cause a larger customer impact. We wouldn’t be aware of some of these issues without Delighted.”
While responding to feedback to help individual customers is the first step, taking those insights back to the broader organization to spur fundamental improvements is key to their strategy.
Not only has collecting customer insights never been easier, Reed has found that sharing these insights with stakeholders at Affirm has made taking action to address customer needs a simple process.
“Thanks to insights we’ve learned from NPS, we are able to share a monthly report with key stakeholders within Affirm, including Product, Client Success, Sales, Legal and Compliance,” says Reed. “Our reporting typically includes current NPS score, mentions of impacts that may have caused scores to fluctuate, top trending issues reported by detractors, and action items that have stemmed from new learnings.”
Not only do these insights make their way to Affirm’s business leaders, but they also tell consumer stories to the front lines of those responsible for addressing customer needs on a daily basis. Damien Guerra, Senior Associate of the Social Care and Community Team, clarifies the impact of their feedback reporting: “Now that we have better data in place, we are able to hand out a story. Whereas in the past, we couldn’t. These customer stories are how we drive impact and process improvements across all teams.”
This shared responsibility centered around customer experience is proof of Affirm’s commitment to using customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
When it comes to whether or not other brands should listen and act based on customer feedback, Reed leaves us with this advice:
“Do it! Learn from your customers!”
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