Customer chief profile: Embedding diversity, inclusion and experience into fintech brand thinking

Diversity and inclusion is one of the biggest cultural challenges organisations are grappling with in 2022. But it’s not necessarily the topic you’d expect a fintech scale-up to be actively trying to cement a position on when it’s still in its brand infancy.

Yet Till Payments chief customer officer, Tanya Green, sees it as a vital issue for the next-gen payments solutions provider to act on as its builds out its brand, CX and growth path. Which is why she spearheaded Till’s #breakthebias campaign, ‘Breaking the bias with Till’, in line with this year’s International Women’s Day. The work involved asking team members to anonymously share stories of past experiences with bias throughout their careers.

“I don’t think you can call yourself a new, innovative brand and not be forward thinking in the way you present people and culture,” Green tells CMO. “Everything we stand for as a business is in the way we look to innovate and support our customer. It would be the complete opposite to then have stale policies and not be an inclusive culture.

“It speaks to brand as a whole, internally and externally, that we invite diversity and inclusion and be at the forefront of this, just like everything else we do.”

As an employer, Till Payments has put time and effort into equality policies such as paternity and parental loss leave. One-third of its leadership team is female, and one in four product managers identify as female.

“For a fintech in scale-up mode to incorporate competitive policies like that from an early step sets the stage for how much we put into people and how we support them,” Green says.

The big project in next 12 months for Green, working closely with her chief people officer counterpart, is a comprehensive corporate social responsibility (CSR) approach. Again, it’s being grounded in diversity and inclusion, with established objectives that befit the vision of being a tech company for good.

It’s this same respect for inclusion that saw Green’s work on Till Payment’s global brand launch begin as an internal brand project. Initial workshops internally aimed to understand what the brand meant to teams before any brand identity work was undertaken. Once visuals came into the mix, all staff voted on their favourite concept.

“Having innovative CSR and policies built around the internal brand, along with our vision of becoming a tech company for good both in products and what we create for our people, is the best brand strategy we could start with,” Green says. “We’ll then have the campaigns and do all the things, but the business and I all want to create a meaningful brand first. That requires steps to be made internally as well as going to market with a product that’s customer centric.”

Building the foundations for CX

Building customer experiences creatively, collectively and from the ground up is now Green’s remit as Till Payment’s newly promoted chief customer officer. Green ascended to the c-level role after spending her first year with the Australian fintech as brand and CX leader. She tells CMO the newly created position comes off the back of solid growth over the last 12 months from a people perspective as well as geographically and operationally.

“It became a real opportunity to create this role to lead how we as a business remain customer centric,” Green comments. “It’s not to say teams weren’t before. But at the pace we’re moving as a scale-up and with all the projects we’re running, it’s a great opportunity to unify teams under one customer vision to stay the course.

“There are no real infrastructure or support issues with CX yet, so we’re in a beautiful place to innovate and develop new experiences. It could be comms, processes or go-to-market - it’s really building experience from the ground up.”  

Credit: Till Payments

As a business actively trialling things, Green is against copying ideas and implementing what other people do. “We are trying to be creative in our thinking and saying when we install for customers, what could that moment look like and be? What’s a great experience and how do we build it?” she asks.

“We are operationalising teams at same time as we build foundations for CX. As we move through customer journeys, we can start to review an install experience, but also set foundations for how teams respond, the time in which they respond and reporting. Are we are just installing versus educating, testing everything? It’s about implementing new ideas at every touchpoint.”  

Several CX-oriented projects have already materialised in the last 10-12 months. Customer support for example, was a huge focus from day one with local 24-hour support. Till is also building triggers around customer support now based on potential onboarding blocks, operational processes, warehouse and time to market.

“We have established functions where we want to make core promises to customers, then then we’ll look to grow, test and learn across others,” Green says.   

The benefit of a combined brand and customer experience team is the opportunity to push through brand promise and key brand moments in the experience while delivering on brand awareness targets at the same time, Green says.

“If you are creating a great CX, you’re no doubt after a great brand reputation, and for referrals. That’s helpful for a business like us in market right now,” she says.

Home-grown Till Payments provides end-to-end smart and seamless payments experiences and has 226 staff across Australia, London, Europe and North America. The company raised $110 million in 2021 to fuel growth plans and grow headcount. Key sectors so far include FMCG, automotive, retail and hospitality.

“As a payments provider, we want to provide for any business and industry. We look to meet with customers, understand the payment need and helping craft the solution for them,” Green explains. “Not everything is out of the box, we want to deliver to the need. So we’re pulling insights from our team on the ground and building that into our platforms.”

Till has also opted for Qualtrics as its brand measurement tool and works with partners such as RFI and Mastercard to drive market and consumer research.

“At the point of scaling, you don’t necessarily have a plethora of customer data insights, but we’re ensuring teams have great conversations, pulling that organic feedback to pull that through in a manual way,” Green says. “We’re about to embark on a global brand research piece as well a mix of focus groups and one-on-ones to get more into the emotive and needs of customers.”

The last two years of digitisation has only sped up opportunities for Till’s vision is put simple, safe and digitised payment experiences into the palm of the customer’s hand. Yet capitalising on even the smallest shifts that represent big opportunity requires agility.

“Even in the last 12 months, some of the directions we planned to take have shifted as an opportunity opened in a market or seeing a competitor go another way. The ability to be agile before we’re too big has been really effective,” Green says.

Personalisation

What’s also key is harnessing data for future personalisation of experience. Till is already building systems and technology to capture data while people are using its products.

“We’re embedding data opportunities in preparation and planning for data intake in everything from CRM to triggers,” Green says. “We are building our customer lifecycle communications program. We’ve just hired several product managers and direct marketers who are working with CRM to build out all opportunities to personalise as we launch those programs. I’d love to say in the next 12 months we will have influx of data and ability to personalise as we’re putting lots of effort into setting that up.”  

Metrics go hand-in-hand with CX effort. For now, Green’s CX team works with customer success on measurements that are of global standard. These include how many calls are captured in a day, how long to respond, drop-offs and attrition. A recent example of insights in action Green points to is Till’s decision to split implementation versus success teams to create a dedicated implementation and training team. This was informed by customer feedback and supported because of Till’s overarching commitment to be a high-touch services provider.

“We have made sure we find propositions that are meaningful for the Till brand and promise and that will differentiate us. For example, a 24-hour local service provider is quite unique in the market. Within our tech build, there’s open integrations that makes payments simpler for customers,” Green says.

Alliance and partnerships also form part of the ongoing strategy and other fintech, partners in key verticals and the wider SaaS and tech company pool are targets as Till works to become a partner and brand of choice.

And through all of this, consistency of brand as Till globalises is critical. “We are establishing brand metrics and processes that need to work across all the new markets,” Green says.

Out of category career learnings

Green says her expanded role with Till is a moment in her career when she’s pulling in every single skillset she’s learnt along the way. It’s Green’s first client-side foray into the financial services space, having previously worked across multiple agencies as well as for The Scentre Group as brand experience manager for Westfield.

“This role requires everything I have learnt on brand strategy across a number of big brands and during my agency life. It requires high-speed, high-volume collaboration, together with the solid business intelligence I have learnt in-house and how impact of brand can spread across every business unit as a component of business success,” Green says.

“I spent time operationalising martech in one former role; now I’m stepping into a business that doesn’t have martech yet. You also just have to jump in and learn along the way.”  

Among the biggest learners Green brings with her from agency land is knowing the benefit of creative and diverse thinking. Which brings us back to the need once more for diversity and inclusion as a brand and business.

“Bringing together different minds in a creative way to solve a problem is so important to the way we work at Till. No one is siloed or left behind and we have a shared vision. I find that the best starting point for any problem or opportunity,” she adds.

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