en
February 12, 2019
Partnering with a broker that maintains highly organised and efficient support centers can have an immense impact on your monthly earnings and overall success as a forex partner. A successfully managed support center guarantees high conversion rates, an optimal customer experience and a longer customer lifetime value, all of which lead to greater trading volumes. Successful brokers understand that a support center’s main purpose is to gain and retain clients so that they don’t defect to the competition; to do this a support center needs the know-how, organisational structure, training sessions, as well as the proper performance tracking and rewards that will keep the teams motivated. That being said, maintaining productive support centers that keep conversion and retention rates at record highs is no easy task. There are a number of key aspects and characteristics that you as an affiliate marketer or IB should be looking for when trying to assess a broker’s support center.
Sales, Retention and Support
The most successful forex / CFD brokers are those that employ client-centric support teams covering clients’ lifecycle, with sales and retention staff. As BDSwiss Head of Conversion Angelos Christofi notes “It’s critical to strategically run the conversion services function, with overall responsibility for quality and revenue. From the moment a new lead comes in, you need to have a strategy to smoothly onboard it, providing 5 stars support and the best customer experience. Having this in mind, we built our teams accordingly, based on the channels driving the traffic and with appropriate funnels based on each client lifecycle, to drive incremental business and improved ROI.”
Experience Matters
The forex industry is highly competitive, making the initial inbound call by a prospect possibly the only chance the broker has at winning the client. Due to the specialized nature of the forex industry, experienced support staff is a key ingredient to a successful support center. The retail forex industry has a steep learning curve and similar to any niche business sector, the forex industry has its own vernacular. Hiring experienced professionals that have a thorough understanding of CFD trading, forex trading platforms and how key market events can affect price direction is therefore crucial to a support center’s overall success, as they indeed add value for the customers. Especially for new traders, who require greater guidance, an experienced account manager is super important.
Training, Training, Training
In such a highly competitive arena such as the forex industry, complacency is not an option! A broker needs to not only hire the right talents for the job but also spend time, money and resources to introduce them to the company’s internal processes and procedures, update them on all running campaigns and promotions, ensure that they understand the dos and don’ts with regards to regulation, as well as educate them on the company’s conversion and retention objectives, best practices and strategies for building client rapport. What is more, a successful broker needs to build a culture of continuous learning and ensure that its sales agents, account managers, support staff, retention officers and anyone maintaining direct contact with clients and therefore contributing to acquisition and retention, have the right guidance, support and specialised training so that they constantly improve their performance.
Multilingual Equals Multicultural
The global appeal of the forex industry has created the need for multilingual and multicultural support centers that can truly cater to a varied and culturally diverse client-base. Forex brokers therefore need to ensure that their acquisition, support and retention teams not only cover a multitude of languages on a 24 hour basis but also that their agents come from varied background and have the right cultural sensitivity to truly understand the client’s perspective and accommodate his or her needs.
Tracking and Rewarding Performance
Applying accurate support center metrics that measure the performance of a broker’s agents is also a key component to optimising conversions. Proper tracking allows for efficient monitoring of conversions, upselling, support and retention efforts, while it also enables a broker to properly reward and encourage agents to meet business goals. What is more, incentives help keep support center teams motivated can create an environment of healthy competition that increases productivity.
How BDSwiss’ Optimised Support centers Reflect On Partner Revenue:
BDSwiss multilingual support centers cover more than 20 languages and operate on a 24 hour basis to ensure that our partners’ referrals receive timely and efficient support. Maintaining a strong organisational structure, we further ensure that our global support centers from Berlin to Kuala Lumpur have the knowledge and expertise necessary to best cater for the needs of our ever growing client base. Having a deep understanding of our CFD products also enables our agents to give traders thorough information and ensure that clients have a clear understanding of the benefits and risks involved in trading forex and CFDs. Our support centers can provide added services that educate the client such as one-on-one sessions, platform walkthroughs, strategy assessment and assist with any issue at hand.
As Angelos notes, “At the end of the day everything from our company’s revenue to its market reputation, boils down to customer satisfaction and long term loyalty. We therefore optimise our support centers by mentoring, monitoring, training and motivating our teams, in order to ensure that our partner’s referrals get the best possible trading experience. At BDSwiss we make sure our support centers are 100% aligned to our partners goals, we give their referrals the best possible service which translates to longer lifetime value, higher trading volumes and greater returns.”