GoCardless provides exceptional customer service with Twilio Voice

GoCardless exists to make handling payments much more straightforward. And Twilio helps the company in their quest to deliver exceptional customer service.

Problem

At university, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson found chasing people for sports club subscriptions a painful process. Teaming up with fellow student Hiroki Takeuchi, they developed the idea of using direct debits to make it easier to accept recurring or one-off payments.

They soon realised that the concept applied beyond the world of college sports. “55% of UK SMEs have cashflow problems right now, and late payments are by far the biggest cause of that,” says Blomfield.

After receiving additional funding, GoCardless grew rapidly. This created a need to improve the way they handled customer calls and feedback. “We’re absolutely fanatical about customer support,” says Business Development Manager, Nabeel Qureshi, “it’s one of the ways we like to differentiate ourselves.”

Solution

GoCardless developer, Tim Rogers, built the company’s phone system and integrated Twilio based on a colleague’s recommendation. “We get information like the call recording from Twilio, and we save that into our Postgres database which means that we have access to that information later,” says Rogers. “Once a call has finished we’re then able to tag it and log information about it.”

When Rogers wanted to add a feature to take calls through a computer rather than just a hardware phone, he was able to do so within an hour via Twilio. “That’s the kind of power we had to change things really quickly and develop in an agile way,” says Rogers.

Results

GoCardless have found Twilio’s data capabilities and ease of integration very powerful. The recorded conversations, for example, allow the team to review and improve the quality of their sales and support calls.

“Twilio helps us focus on our core business,” says Blomfield. “For us that’s direct debits, so we don’t have to set up our mailservers, we don’t have to run our phone systems, we use Twilio to redirect calls to our support team, it just makes running a company much, much easier.”