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Here's how micro-lending startup SlicePay addresses students' queries on lending

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Soma Tah
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Soma Tah

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Access to small amount of credits and that too without collaterals can be very difficult for students. The 'Buy now-Pay later' micro-lending startup, SlicePay looks to solve this problem by giving students credit to buy products such as laptops and mobile phones, enabling them to pay in monthly instalments.

The founders, Deepak Malhotra and Rajan Bajaj, found that whilst they were at college, the payment channels they had available were inaccessible or carried lengthy wait times, which led them to establish SlicePay in late 2015.

“Most students are unable to pay for more expensive items in cash, up front. This is where SlicePay steps in, giving them access to simple, flexible payment options they can use. We provide a credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to students from over 300 colleges in Bangalore and Chennai, and are planning to expand to more cities before the end of this calendar year,” said Suhas Reddy, director of operations, SlicePay.

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When a student searches for a product, SlicePay provides monthly payment options alongside related down payment details. Students can choose their preferred payment option and use their ‘student ID’ to purchase the product. SlicePay might require additional information such as phone number of a classmate or a parent.

Instead of offering direct cash to students, SlicePay helps them buy products and services from its partnered platforms. From e-commerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, to wallet recharge like Paytm to many other categories, it has tied up with many online platforms, where students can use SlicePay payment option. They also have a section where students can avail courses from Byju's.

SlicePay had previously selected Intercom to help with the growing number of enquiries from students eager to set up accounts. “We found that most of our students liked to use live chat to contact us, but they expected immediate responses which put a huge amount of pressure on our customer support team,” said Reddy. Intercom didn’t offer SlicePay adequate visibility into how long it was taking the team to respond to enquiries or reporting on how they could improve the customer support they provided.

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SlicePay put an emphasis on enabling customers to self-serve, and invested in building a knowledge center to answer common questions in real time.

“The quality of our customer support is extremely important to us. It is what sets us apart in our market and we needed a solution that would help us centralise our support function, give us greater visibility and accountability and ultimately help us to provide a better service to our customers.”

That's the reason, that in March 2017, they chose to migrate to Zendesk to manage all customer support and the change has been significant.

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“I’ve been so impressed by the analytics data available already. I can see how long our agents are taking to respond to queries and can therefore help to manage their workloads more effectively. This data is invaluable as we grow because I know when we need to bring on more customer agents, which we’re doing over the next couple of months,” said Reddy.

The number of apps integrating into Zendesk, has certainly been an eye opener to Reddy and his team. “Round Robin, the ticket assignment app, has been a particular favourite. I just go into the App Store and have a look at what’s available for us to use. It saves me bothering my busy tech team to be honest. We can try them ourselves and  use the ones that work best for our team,” said he.

And while SlicePay is currently focused on optimizing their customer experience with Support and Help Center, they are already considering adding Chat as an additional support channel later in the year.

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