Client service and ongoing support

How will your banking provider support your business day to day?

While high-quality payment and clearing capabilities and ease of integration should be your main criteria for selecting a provider, the relationship doesn’t end once you’re live.

It’s as important for your business to operate efficiently, get useful analysis and optimise the experience for your customers. However, things can go wrong. If they do, your provider needs dedicated reactive and proactive support to help solve any issues.

When assessing any potential provider, you should review its client relationship and support team.

Client relationship management

A relationship team will often be your main point of contact as you implement a service. They will also help you identify and explore new benefits and new opportunities to drive incremental value for your business.

Relationship managers are crucial to strengthening your relationship, advocating for your business’ needs internally and ensuring you benefit from long-term success with your banking partner. Firms have different approaches to client and relationship management, so it is worth considering how important this service is to your business.

Client support

Your provider’s ‘client support’ (also referred to as ‘customer support’) will be your first point of contact if things go wrong. They should be receptive and responsive to your needs, anticipating where providing guidance and support could add value to your operation, and offer triage services that include a dedicated and competent complaint-handling function.

When assessing your potential provider, consider the following points:

• Technical support: are there dedicated support engineers for technical problems?
• Opening hours: In case of an emergency, when is support available? And how can you contact support outside of typical Monday to Friday working hours?
• Response times and Service Level Agreements (SLA): how quickly will support respond to and resolve any issue? Is the support model ‘tiered’, meaning critical and wide-reaching issues are prioritised? What are the SLAs in place for specific issues or fixes?
• Support levels: does the provider offer a range of support packages that reflect different product uses?

Customer portal

With a significant issue, you will want to speak to your support team to get a resolution. But for the day-to-day questions or to help educate new members of your team, your provider should also provide a dedicated knowledge centre or customer portal and regularly updated helpdesk that answers commonly asked questions providing your team with insights and documentation.

Technical documentation

This is the technical library with everything your team will need to know about your provider’s services, as well proactive updates around upcoming changes and their expected timelines. Your provider should have a well-organised set of content so your technical teams can self-serve and move as quickly as possible.

• Will I work with a customer success/relationship manager, and how will they support my business?
• What hours is your customer support available?
• Do you have a self-serve helpdesk for common questions?
• How do you tier and escalate issues?
• What are your SLAs for responding to and resolving issues?
• Do you have a dedicated customer portal?
• Where can I find your technical documentation?

We understand that choosing your banking partner is not an easy decision and that you need a banking partner you can trust and rely on for a long-term partnership, and we treat it accordingly.

ClearBank has dedicated relationship managers and client operations teams to launch your service and to help if things go wrong.

We also have clear processes for responding to issues depending on the potential or actual impact. For example, we aim to respond to critical incidents within 30 minutes and provide a resolution within four hours of being contacted by the client.

ClearBank client support analysts are trained to investigate and respond to technical queries and are split between specialist teams for multi-currency/FX/international payments and GBP/domestic queries. These expert teams act as a bridge between our clients and technology teams. Where necessary, any issues that require further investigation and escalated to the relevant technology and product teams for resolution.

Our Client Portal provides updates on service performance alongside a Knowledge Centre that offers answers to common questions and queries. Freshdesk is our one-stop-shop for raising support tickets as well as providing self-service options. We also offer self-serve API documentation and service updates via our GitHub repository.