An Interview with our Head of Customer Support, Carolina Vianna
If anyone understands the challenges of building an ecommerce business in Latin America, it’s our fabulous Support team. The PrimeiroPay support team are at the front line, working alongside our clients to help make their international expansion as effortless and profitable as possible.
Today, we’re talking to our Head of Customer Support, Carolina Vianna, to get her thoughts on how we help our clients grow their businesses in complex international markets.
What are the most frequent issues that come up for international businesses expanding into Latin America? What advice would you give business owners considering an expansion into the region?
I’d say that as globalization grows and the payments process becomes increasingly digitized, international expansion is becoming substantially more complex for international commerce.
My suggestion would be to start by making sure that you have a good sense of the cultural diversity, tax legislation and regulatory complexities you’ll be facing before you make a move to expand. At PrimeiroPay, we can definitely help clients get a clear sense of the challenges and how they can be overcome.
In the Customer Support team, we see some merchants and online customers struggling to understand cross-border payments’. This is particularly tricky in emerging markets like Latin America because online shoppers want to use local payment methods, like debit cards or Boletos. We can help by breaking down the process into its individual steps, so the merchant can understand exactly when they’ll get paid, how they can save money on currency exchange rates, and so on.
We do get a lot of questions from merchants about handling chargebacks and refunds too. These can be an expensive headache for online businesses, but local solutions are available, such as offering instant payment methods like PIX.
What do you think is different about PrimeiroPay’s customer service?
In larger companies, customer service teams don’t have time to understand and empathize with the customers’ issues from my colleagues’ experience. Customer Service sends out standardized answers. Half the time, the customer gets a response from a robot, not a real person.
At PrimeiroPay, the approach couldn’t be more different. We always start by thinking about the client. What’s causing them inconvenience? What’s the best way we could help fix the issue? Whether they need a quick fix or a much more complex and detailed response, it’s our job to ensure that they get a complete and thorough solution. We’re human beings, helping other human beings, not automatons.
Something else that I think is a bit different about how we do Customer Support – we aren’t just looking to solve the problem quickly. We want to make sure that the client won’t run into an even bigger issue in the future. So we’re trying to actually solve every customer issue, not just crank through as many Support tickets as possible. We aren’t just there to solve a problem; we’re also there to make sure every client has a great experience working with our team. We prioritize fast assistance, complete information, total transparency, and full attention to each client.
What’s a typical day like for the PrimeiroPay support team?
We start the day by analysing all the tickets that have come in to spot any patterns of users running into the same issues. If we see a few people with the same issue, we will take action right away. We don’t rest until the problem is solved – after all, our clients are our top priority here.
If there aren’t any major issues coming up, then once we’ve worked our way through our Support tickets, we’ll move on to our strategic priorities for the week. We aim to be constantly improving our clients’ experience with our payments solution and services.
Thanks, Carol – keep up the great work!
If you’d like to find out more about how PrimeiroPay could help your business grow in Latin America, just click here to set up a free call.
