CommonBond

“We’ve been using Delighted since 2015. Our values include being customer-focused in everything we do, and Delighted helps us stay hyper-aware of exactly how customers feel about our product.”

Simpler, smarter, student loans for a brighter future. With over 1.6 trillion now owed by Americans to student loan lenders, CommonBond is committed to easing the financial burdens faced by college students and graduates with a fresh approach to student loan financing. 

What makes CommonBond unique is their ability to remove the complexity from student loan financing. They’ve achieved a frictionless experience in two ways. First, by leveraging technology to create a completely seamless, digital loan process that’s perfectly in line with what today’s borrowers want and expect. 

Second, by ensuring that customers are cared for along each step of their financial journey with easy-to-complete applications, an award-winning customer care team, and Money Mentors to help select suitable protections and payment plans. Compared to traditional financial institutions, CommonBond borrowers can save significantly on their monthly payments from refinancing their loans.

“It’s my responsibility to ensure that every borrower gets the best possible experience,” says Craig Shayowitz, Operations Manager at CommonBond. As a leader in the fintech industry, CommonBond takes customer experience seriously, and uses Delighted to measure the success of their people-first mentality.

“We’ve been using Delighted since 2015,” Shayowitz says. “Our values include being customer-focused in everything we do, and Delighted helps us stay hyper-aware of exactly how customers feel about our product.”

When it comes to keeping a finger on the pulse of their customers, CommonBond sees having a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) as an essential benchmark for determining if they are in fact delivering on customer expectations. Shayowitz relies on the Delighted NPS platform to continuously measure and track whether they are reaching their NPS goal — a number significantly higher than their industry’s average.

“Most of our peers have an NPS hovering around the 30s,” says Shayowitz. “Our success is measured by meeting an aggressive NPS of 80 over a given time period. NPS is the gold standard for us here at CommonBond, and Delighted is the only way for us to capture and measure this feedback.”

For CommonBond, Delighted NPS is the key to obtaining deeper insights from their customers. The platform helps Shayowitz and his team segment NPS feedback by user cohort (borrower versus co-signer), product, interaction, and more, to probe into ways they can continually improve customer care.

Delighted is also an avenue to help them grow their business. The more promoters they can identify with Delighted NPS, the more easily they can launch word-of-mouth campaigns and carefully planned referral programs. 

Because of this, it’s important for Shayowitz’s team to survey as many people as possible, and Delighted’s multiple survey channels are perfect for doing just that.

Initially, CommonBond used email surveys to kick off their NPS program, and achieved response rates of 10% by using Delighted to identify the best times to send.

However, to reach a larger segment of their customers, they’ve since expanded to Delighted’s SMS text surveys. For CommonBond, SMS surveys are effective because the majority of their borrowers are mobile users — a survey delivered by text is incredibly intuitive for their customers to answer. 

Using the Delighted interface, they can also easily customize the survey text to reflect their brand voice, providing a consistent experience across channels. “By switching from email surveys to SMS text surveys in Delighted, we were able to increase overall response rates from 10% to 22%,”* says Shayowitz.

Using Delighted to test various survey channels ensures that their program is operating at maximum efficiency, and that valuable feedback rolls in on a continuous basis.

In addition to hearing from more customers, the real value of the Delighted platform is how it surfaces verbatim customer comments that explain why an experience was good or bad.

“One of the big strengths of Delighted is that it adds a narrative to a situation, which can spur action even more effectively than data,” says Shayowitz. “You’re imagining this person who had that experience, and you empathize more with them.” 

This feedback with context lets stakeholders across the entire organization recognize patterns for things that they do well, while motivating them to improve.

To maintain customer experience as a key differentiator, Shayowitz needs a quickfire way to share feedback across the entire company. CommonBond uses Delighted’s pre-built Slack and Hubspot integrations to make this possible.

Slack ensures that every piece of NPS feedback collected is distributed to the correct teams to take action and close the loop with customers. In fact, CommonBond uses this feature to quickly identify detractors, route them to customer care, and follow up with them when necessary.

“When it comes to sharing feedback, we use Delighted’s Slack integration. We have a Slack channel with NPS scores and comments. I follow up in the channel to make sure everyone sees it — this helps us manage and follow up with promoters, passives, and detractors.”

CommonBond uses Delighted’s Hubspot integration to report on the success of their care team by pulling relevant customer feedback metrics quickly, and all in one place. “We use Delighted’s Hubspot integration for our care program,” says Shayowitz. “I’m able to compare support response times to NPS scores, and I’m able to do this in minutes instead of having to download a ton of spreadsheets.” 

The Hubspot integration helps them uncover deeper customer care insights, such as the relationship between time-to-resolution and NPS score given.

For CommonBond, customer experience is essential to ever-improving the services they provide to their borrowers. By implementing Delighted NPS, CommonBond has been able to fortify external relationships by identifying where they can better deliver on customer expectations. “Delighted helps us strengthen our partnerships. It’s one thing to say we have a good care team and then another thing to show partners that our NPS is 75.”

As a company whose mission is to help borrowers regain control of their loans, the customer experience will always be central to CommonBond’s strategy. Shayowitz says: “I’ve worked at other places where how your customers feel is a black box that only the customer care team gets to see. With Delighted, everyone can hear customer feedback even if they don’t talk to customers all the time.”

“Delighted is a customer-focused company that helps you become a customer-focused company.”

*As of 1/1/2022, SMS is no longer a Delighted distribution channel. For any questions, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help you explore other sending channels, or SMS options with our parent company, Qualtrics.