Let us first define what we mean when we say forex broker support department. Well, the customer support department comprises the agents that take the chats, answer the phones and reply to emails. They are your front-line foot soldiers.
Very often, they will need help from your other departments. For example, they will need help from your finance department with deposit and withdrawal related queries or from your compliance/onboarding department (to deal with onboarding related queries), dealing/risk departments (trade disputes), MetaTrader administration team (trading platform related queries). We can also consider these departments the part of your customer support team.
Your customer support is a proverbial face of your company. If you are in this business for the long haul and intend to earn your money honestly (if not, I am afraid this article won’t be of much help to you), you, as an aspiring CEO, need to pay close attention to your customer support department. The quality of your service is one thing that you can compete on.
1. General Thoughts on Customer Support
NOTE! Different terminology may be used in different countries to designate these departments.
So, your new and shiny broker has been registered. You got the license, and you are eager to go live. You give all your critical infrastructure a final stress test, then wait for the next time Mercury goes retrograde 🙂 and you go live. For the purpose of this article, we are going to assume that you planned an exceptional marketing campaign. You struck a deal or two with some IBs. And basically, you made everything you could to make sure you get a steady flow of clients when you go live.
Once your first traders show up at your doorstep, they will ask for your help, and that is perfectly natural. As we mentioned in our previous series of articles, the forex business is heavily reliant on technology, and technology fails once in a while no matter how perfect it is. And not all retail traders will have master’s degrees in computer science. So, if you want to win their business, take that fact into consideration.
Yes, they will bombard you with emails. They will flood your chat room. And they most definitely will call your phone number whenever they have problems with your trading platform or have questions about your trading conditions or want to withdraw some or all of their funds. Your customer support team will communicate with your traders. Your traders will make conclusions about your company based on their experience with your support staff. If one of your staff says something inappropriate or if they take too long to address the client’s issue, these guys will take to social media to vent their frustration. And this is the last thing you want. That is why you have to put time and effort into organizing your department properly early on.
2. Reference Materials
Your support personnel should be able to tackle basic problems (e.g. a client can’t log into their client area or their trading platform) and answer simple questions (e.g. “Are you regulated?” “Are my funds safe with you?”) on their own without having to rely on the help from other departments within your company. The best way to achieve this level of proficiency is to learn by doing. Also, your team should have access to an extensive library of reference materials at their disposal to be as efficient as possible. Let us have a look at the list below. It is not an all-inclusive and exhaustive one, of course:
- Extensive FAQ Section
You will need to create two versions of it. One of them will be for your client-oriented and the other one will be for your staff. Let us review the case of the former. An FAQ section is an extremely useful thing to have and you shouldn’t underestimate its importance. Why? As the name of the section suggests, it covers the areas of your business that your clients struggle the most with or want to know the most about.
Once you put in writing the answers to their questions and/or create detailed explanations of difficult to grasp concepts (e.g. round-turn lot commission calculation), your support managers will refer your clients to that area of your website. This will take part of the load off of your support team. As you can imagine, no matter how patient you are, it can become tedious to answer the same questions day in and day out.
- Building an FAQ section
So, how do you build one? As a brand new broker, you have a choice. You can either copy an FAQ from one of your competitors and hope that the issues their traders face are like the issues of your traders. Surely, there are several problems that all retail brokers will experience because the overwhelming majority of them use the same trading platform (MT4/MТ5). But other than that, the difference in internal workings can be dramatic. For this reason, we wouldn’t recommend pursuing this option. But how do you build an FAQ section from scratch and how do you make it useful to your traders?
The short answer is research, again and again and again. Above, we said that your traders will contact you through all communication channels you offer to them and they will tell you exactly what problems occur most often. All you have to do is analyse all the closed tickets in your ticketing software, all emails and phone calls after a month or two. Based on this analysis, you should be able to put all their issues into different categories. For instance, there are questions about the company or there are specific MT4/MT5 related problems.
By looking at what’s going on within those categories, you can spot the areas that your traders struggle the most with. That’s how you build your FAQ section.
Please note, however, that you should update your FAQ section actively to keep it up-to-date. It shouldn’t be a make it and forget it kind of thing.
- Extensive Library of Video Tutorials
Practice has proved once and again that the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words hasn’t lost its significance today. No matter how well you train your staff, no matter how well-written and detailed your FAQ section is, there will always be people among your traders who digest information as a video better than in the written form. For this reason, create an extensive library of video tutorials covering distinct problems. Videos are relatively easy and cheap to produce even in-house. Just make sure you use the native speakers to do the voiceovers. And if you create a YouTube channel and upload these videos there, this will also contribute to your website’s SEO.
3. Specialized Software
Besides the reference materials we mentioned above, your customer support reps should have the following “specialized” software at their disposal.
- Remote Access Software
Once in a while your team will encounter a client or clients that do everything by the book (e.g. they don’t type their passwords in, they copy&paste them) and yet they cannot log in or experience other problems. In such cases, it is just easier if one of your team logs into your client’s machine and sorts things out for them.
That’s where remote access software comes into play. And believe it or not, it was a game changer, when we finally tried it. It became so much easier to help our clients to get things running. What used to take our support managers ages to accomplish only took them 10-15 minutes. Our support managers could help many more clients with reduced amounts of time and effort. So, if your budget allows it, you should seriously consider investing in this kind of software.
- MetaTrader Manager
If you are thinking whether your support managers should have access to the MetaTrader manager terminal, the answer is definitely yes, they absolutely should. Well, if not all of them, then surely the most trustworthy ones.
What should they be able to do with the manager’s terminal? At the very minimum, they should be able to use the terminal to troubleshoot if the client is using the right password to log in to their trading account. They should be able to use the journal to check the trade logs whenever they investigate trade disputes, for instance.
- ChatBots
Chatbots are nifty little tools that can be used along with your chatting software. They have the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of your team while reducing its size. The chatbots rely on a decision tree mechanics to offer clients potential solutions to basic questions. Essentially, it allows us to filter out only those clients whose queries can’t be solved without human intervention.
4. FAQ Section for Your Customer Support Department
We briefly mentioned above that there should be two versions of FAQ. One should be intended for your customers and the other one for your support staff. Now, let’s turn our attention to the FAQ section for your managers and possibly for your other departments as well. Creating an extensive knowledge database about the internal workings of your broker is an absolute must. On the one hand, it serves the same purpose as the FAQ intended for clients. People are human, they make mistakes, forget important things when you most need them. For instance, your support manager is investigating a trade dispute but forgot how to generate trade logs in MT Manager. If there is a manager’s FAQ section, they know they can always fall back on, it will boost their confidence and morale.
On the other hand, it contributes to the business continuity. Let us say one of your leading employees goes on a long vacation or takes a sick leave or leave the company. It will be easier to find someone new and bring them up to speed when everything is well-documented. There are manuals, tutorials, and so forth. It will also be easier to add more people to your team and to train them with a certain degree of consistency.
5. Policies and Procedures
And last, but not least, the most boring but yet an integral part of a well-functioning organisation. Not only your client support department, but every department within your firm should have its own set of policies and procedures. They promote consistency across the organisation, both for your clients and your personnel.
This consistency builds a healthy reputation for your organisation, especially regarding interactions between your employees and your customers. Without an adequate and well-thought-out set of policies and procedures, there are no rules. We design and put them in place to bring order and consistency to the chaos that would exist in their absence. Clearly, policies and procedures are an integral part of successful and healthy business. So, don’t underestimate their importance. The time and effort you put into their creation will eventually pay off manifold.
6. Incentive Programs
The good news is you don’t need to worry about creating and putting an incentives program in place right off the bat. When you are building a business from the ground up, there are a lot of other things that you need to take care of first. But it should be somewhere in the back of your head. One day down the road, you must find time for this part of your business.
The main purpose of the incentives program is to encourage the behaviour of your employees that is beneficial to your business and to discourage the behaviour detrimental to it (e.g. showing up late for work or being rude to your clients or colleagues).
So how do you go about creating an incentive program from scratch? Well, here is how we did it. We put in place a very simple “carrot and stick” policy based on “points”. You show up on time for work, you are courteous to clients and colleagues, you do your “homework” (as you introduce new products, features, your support staff will need to know them by heart), you get points. At the end of the quarter, your support reps can convert these points into money (or gift cards or whatever you prefer).
Bottom line is, you need keep things simple. Don’t overcomplicate anything. Your incentives program should be straight-forward and easy to understand for everyone, otherwise rumours may start and rumours lead to mutiny on your ship. Kidding, they lead to frustration and may end up in unpleasant conversations.
