Customer story
Yoco
South Africa's leading payments fintech moved its customer service to Bird, deflecting 42% of chats with bots and letting agents handle 4–6 conversations at once.
Sector
Payments fintech
Channels
Headline
42% of human chats deflected
The challenge
A live chat that didn't match the brand — or the customer experience.
For South African fintech Yoco, everything centers on the customer experience. The company offers an entire payment ecosystem for businesses — card machines, payment portals, financial management tools — and has grown rapidly since launching in 2015, processing over $2 billion annually with more than 350,000 customers signed up.
When Yoco moved to a large traditional CRM vendor for its customer service software in 2020, it soon realized the live chat feature didn't align with its brand or provide the functionality it needed.
- Off-brand experience.The chat solution looked too "corporate" for Yoco's brand.
- Broken omnichannel. The chat did not allow users to start a conversation and switch to WhatsApp, and connectivity issues often resulted in lost conversations.
- Cumbersome support. Getting help required merchants to fill out a form and wait in a queue.
“We were looking for true omnichannel integration — a seamless journey for customers to move through channels without losing context. We knew there had to be a better solution out there.”
Simone Santiago, Senior Product Manager, Yoco
The solution
A customer-centric platform Yoco could build to its own specifications.
After evaluating a variety of vendors, Yoco chose Bird to unify its customer communications. Bird met what the team was looking for — a customer-centric, true omnichannel tool where a conversation can start on live chat, move to WhatsApp, and persist across both channels — and Santiago and her team could clearly visualize how Bird would help the company scale.
They were enticed by products like Bird's Flow Builder, which let businesses scale operations while still providing a data-driven, personalized customer experience, with drag-and-drop functionality that delivered the no-code solution they were after.
“We were immediately drawn to Bird because of its unparalleled level of customization and flexibility. The ability to design, build, and edit our own bot experiences, flows, and communication was a game changer for us.”
Ian Heck, Senior System Specialist, Yoco
“We saw a future where we could efficiently scale our customer operations as a function without needing to then scale our headcount to match that growth.”
Simone Santiago, Senior Product Manager, Yoco
How it works
Asynchronous support, proactive alerts, and personalized self-service.
After what Santiago called "the best platform onboarding we've ever had," the team began using Bird right away to reduce calls, deflect human chats, and improve the customer experience.
- Asynchronous support via live chat and WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the predominant channel of choice for Yoco customers, so it sits front and center of their communications. Instead of being on one phone call, agents can now handle 4–6 chats simultaneously.
- Proactive notifications.Where Yoco previously couldn't alert merchants to issues, it can now send notifications before merchants have to reach out — during recent downtime it used a Bird widget and channel messages to keep customers informed.
- Personalized self-service journeys.By integrating Bird with its CRM (Salesforce), Yoco prioritizes self-service first with live agents as a fallback — for example, instantly verifying a merchant's identity to tell them their next payout date.
“We were able to give our customers a heads up that something went wrong. Previously, we weren't able to do that. We had to wait for a merchant to call in order for us to give them that information.”
Ian Heck, Senior System Specialist, Yoco
The results
Better support through messaging, fewer calls to live agents.
Meeting customers where they are lets Yoco provide a seamless, conversational experience — no transfers, no waiting for a call, no re-explaining why you called. The ability to support customers through messaging has led to a significant drop in support calls, with 42% of inquiries now successfully deflected by chatbots.
42%
Of inquiries now successfully deflected by chatbots, reducing the number of users who need to speak to a live agent.
4–6
Chats a single agent can now handle simultaneously, versus one phone call before.
73
CSAT score on chat.
“Our customers can now chat to us on their channel of choice and seamlessly switch between those channels throughout. It's like you're picking up the conversation right where you left off, and that's the feeling we want to create.”
Simone Santiago, Senior Product Manager, Yoco
What's next
The future is chat.
As Yoco grows across Africa, the team is integrating Salesforce Marketing Cloud and WhatsApp for marketing activities such as merchant re-engagement campaigns and expanding into new territories, enabled by Bird's email and language translation capabilities. One thing stays the same: the focus on chat communications.
“I think it's helped us connect with our merchants on a deeper level, because we're speaking to them where they're at. There's actually a really good trajectory that this is a future where the majority of people are choosing chat as their first point of contact with us.”
Simone Santiago, Senior Product Manager, Yoco
Carry-forward reference from bird.com. Metrics and named quotes reported by Yoco.
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