Key takeaways
Like airport staff and ramp attendants, members of Binance's largest department work behind the scenes to help millions of users around the world enjoy a seamless crypto adventure.
As the first point of contact, Binance's Customer Service (CS) team plays an indispensable role in putting Binance's user-centric philosophy into practice.
In its early days, Binance did not have the advanced customer service in place today; the team has undergone a long process of growth and evolution to arrive at its current state.
Statistically, around 1% of the world's population has interacted with Binance customer service (CS) at least once. Creating an account, recovering funds deposited by mistake, and countless other routine operations are all handled by the CS team. As the first point of contact for our users, Binance CS is essential to realizing our user-centric philosophy.
If members of the Binance engineering team can be thought of as the mechanics who ensure that the engine of the Binance plane is running perfectly at all times, the team of the CS represents both airport staff and ramp staff. Serving millions of users around the world, they ensure that every “passenger” reaches their crypto destination quickly and safely. Working largely behind the scenes, their presence often goes unnoticed, but becomes invaluable when people need help.
An underlying principle
The CS team is Binance's largest department that handles immediate user requests, training, quality assurance, and token recovery, to name just a few of its tasks.
The community spirit of the crypto sector and the user-centric ethos of Binance give the CS team a prominent place within the company. Its members often engage with those from other departments during meetings or town halls, primarily arguing for the need to align user needs with business priorities.
The underlying principle is clear: user needs must transcend and rise above any internal status or industry distinctions at Binance.
Difficult beginnings
In its early days, Binance lacked the advanced customer support it has today, since the ambitious young company served a much smaller user base. None of the automated tools, well-established procedures, or archives of information we have today existed: all operations were manual. Users usually got help by submitting tickets or sending emails, which each CS agent had to take note of manually to deal with all sorts of issues. Without dedicated internal resources or processes, the team often had to ask colleagues for help in finding relevant information.
It was in late 2017 that things really started to get tense: just six months after its launch, Binance became the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in terms of trading volume. The capacity of the existing CS team was struggling to keep up with this explosive growth. CS veteran Mindy remembers those days: “Even working day and night, we couldn’t keep up with the demands. Sometimes the query queue in the customer service system was several hours long. »
In January 2018, Binance had to temporarily halt new user onboarding due to the colossal volume of registrations and rapidly increasing demand. Each time registrations reopened, new users flocked to the platform, and the question of when Binance would allow people to register again became a hot topic in the crypto community.
Pressures on the system
In late 2020, the market was recovering quickly after a period of declining activity, and the resulting surge in traffic placed significant pressure on Binance's internal systems, including those underpinning our CS. It became clear that the third-party CRM system Binance used at the time was unable to keep up with the exponential increase in online requests. Following this, the CS team received strong criticism internally and externally.
While CS agents provide crucial help as a first point of contact, this also means they endure user frustration, even when their issues have nothing to do with the agents themselves.
Faced with this growing pressure, the technical and CS teams organized internal training as well as a live AMA to better explain to the community the problems they were facing, and the best ways to resolve them.
Dealing with turbulence
As Binance’s user base continued to grow rapidly, pressure continued to mount, both internally and externally. Between the last months of 2020 and the summer of 2021, many CS agents resigned or requested an internal transfer due to the pressure and emotional stress they experienced from their work.
To help address these challenges, He Yi, co-founder of Binance, temporarily took over the management of the CS in 2021 to review the organizational structure and obtain resources from other departments. The HR team was tasked with reconnecting with former employees, while current company employees were able to raise concerns with management without an intermediary. The best performing employees were rewarded. These measures led to a significant reduction in the turnover rate of the CS team.
Throughout these many difficulties, each member of the team carried a huge weight on their shoulders. After identifying the most pressing issues, Binance mobilized to resolve them and lay the foundation for the robust systems and frameworks we have today.
AI, humans and systems
Currently, Binance CS supports 17 languages and dozens of industries. Frontline CS teams are divided into several subgroups based on products, creating more standardized processes and a comprehensive general service system.
Internal tools and a database, including a knowledge base, a training system and a test center, form a structured process that each CS agent follows, from onboarding training to daily tasks. This system significantly improves the efficiency of the team, which is thus able to support tens of millions of users around the world.
The implementation of self-service tools is excellent proof of this improved systematization. By clicking on the chat button, users can avail options to reset their account, complete identity verification, reset their withdrawal, etc. in the self-service toolbar. The addition of AI-powered bots is another improvement that has helped alleviate much of the pressure and helped CS officers handle more complex and specialized cases.
Today, most user requests are answered within a minute and resolved in CS's first chat, a huge improvement from the company's early days when users could wait hours in the queue.
Empathy and connection
When faced with problems that concern their finances, users always prefer to receive help from humans: after all, AI cannot understand emotions.
Doris, a senior CS agent, says the team is aware of this urgency and this need for human contact. Even when a complex case takes time to resolve, a CS agent responds within seconds to the first interactions to inform the user that their problem is being handled by the team.
Much emotion is implicit in social interactions, and humans are much better at understanding their context to provide holistic responses rather than responding every sentence and acutely grasping emotional needs to provide comfort.
User needs are not only functional, but also emotional, and CS agents must be aware of these sensitivities. As Vincent, a senior CS executive, says: “Sometimes even a single word in a conversation can make the user feel respected and taken seriously. »
The art of balance
The Binance CS team is the link between the company and its users. Whether launching new products or adjusting compliance policies, CS officers are often the first to detect changes within the organization and their potential impact on users. The CS team passes user and community feedback on products and marketing to relevant departments, leading to improvements through a positive feedback loop.
Binance requires all managers to complete training including a full day spent handling customer requests followed by two to six hours of CS rotation each quarter. These responsibilities ensure that user feedback guides product designs and business operations from the outset.
The CS team also impacts the roles and responsibilities of other departments: for example, the Anti-Fraud Team recently expressed its gratitude to CS officers who, through their proactive collaborative efforts, have repeatedly prevented users to transfer funds to suspicious external parties.
Recovery of funds
The CS includes a special team to handle issues related to user deposits that are not credited. It is responsible for identifying the underlying reasons for these concerns and determining whether or not users should provide more information. In 2022 and 2023, this team processed nearly 400,000 complaints about uncredited deposits and recovered and refunded over $4.35 billion in digital assets for our users. Of these, unlisted token deposits were one of the most common issues.
These matters require close collaboration with portfolio and clearing teams, as well as other internal and external stakeholders, to investigate and resolve issues. Since launching these initiatives, Binance has expanded its support for six blockchain networks to 32 networks, with the ability to directly recover assets on half of them and the need to meet certain recovery conditions on the other 16 .
Managing complexity
In blockchain, especially in its early days, there was an informal rule: if tokens were sent to the wrong address, they were lost. Binance was one of the first players in the crypto sector to help users recover their tokens. She has often been criticized for her actions in this regard, and the limitations of her services have been questioned: but we persevered.
Yet such initiatives can cause unexpected challenges: Melody, head of the user redress team, explains that the asset recovery process is very complex and intensive on internal resources, and not all errors cannot be caught up. By setting recovery fees, Binance attempts to balance protecting user interests without fostering their dependence or the misconception that erroneous transfers have no consequences.
Some cases are more complex and require a lot of time and resources: this is why the members of this specialized team are extremely satisfied when an asset recovery case is successful. As Melody points out, “These recovery initiatives are very important to the user, regardless of the amount involved.” The best feeling is pleasantly surprising individuals who thought they had permanently lost their funds.
Positive energy
If you ever have the chance to meet one of the members of the CS to listen to them talk about their profession, it would be difficult to guess their place on the team, because the horizontal organization of Binance clearly shines through at its greatest. service.
Several team members admit that in the high-pressure environment in which they operate daily, supportive, resilient and competent colleagues are essential. The team's positive energy is a big reason for their extended presence: when the market is booming and users are active, the workload increases, putting immense pressure on the CS team. Sometimes an agent may tearfully confide in his superior; after venting his emotions, however, he eventually pulls himself together and continues to work.
In the early days of Binance, a veteran of the CS team remembers calling executives in the middle of the night to ask for help resolving a problem. Over time and as CS systems and workflows improved significantly, the constant struggle with immediate issues lessened and our CS experts were able to gradually reclaim their personal space and implement practices reasonable workload management.
The faces behind the screens
Just as busy passengers can often overlook airport staff, many crypto users sometimes don't realize that the CS agent behind every conversation is a real person, who is fighting their own battles, may be experiencing personal issues, and is feeling feelings of distress. emotions. Maybe it's a father who has just returned from a bike ride in the park with his children, a young woman who loves folk music, or a fan of a certain type of ice cream.
Our CS agents are aware of this reality, and the prospect of direct recognition motivates them less than the pride and joy of embodying and living Binance's user-centric culture on a daily basis. Accompanying users throughout their crypto journey and helping them overcome the problems and obstacles that stand in their way is one of the most difficult tasks within Binance, but also the most rewarding of all.
