Daily Life of Binance Customer Service Agents
Main Takeaways
The work of Binance’s largest department is akin to the roles of airport staff and ground crew, working behind the scenes to help millions of users globally enjoy a smooth crypto journey.
As the first point of contact, Binance’s Customer Service (CS) team plays an indispensable role in putting Binance’s user-focused ethos into practice.
In its early days, Binance didn’t have the advanced customer service setup it has now. The team has gone through a long process of growth and evolution to get to where they are today.
Statistically, around 1% of the global population has interacted with Binance’s Customer Service (CS) department at least once. Registering an account, recovering erroneously deposited funds, and countless other routine situations are all handled by the CS team. As the first point of contact for our users, Binance’s CS arm is indispensable to translating our user-driven philosophy into real life.
If Binance’s engineering team can be seen as the mechanics making sure that the airplane’s engine runs seamlessly at all times, the CS team is both the airport staff and ground crew. By serving millions of users globally, they ensure that each “passenger” reaches their crypto destination safely and promptly. Largely working behind the scenes, their presence often goes unnoticed yet becomes invaluable when people need help.
An Underlying Principle
The CS team is Binance’s largest department, composed of individuals dealing with immediate user inquiries, training, quality assurance, and token recovery, just to name a few.
The community-driven spirit of the crypto industry and Binance’s user-focused ethos grant the CS team a prominent voice within the company. Team members are often seen in dialogue with other departments during public meetings or town halls, primarily focusing on aligning user needs with business priorities.
The underlying principle is clear: user needs must cut across and rise above any internal rank or departmental divide at Binance.
From Gritty Beginnings
In its early days, Binance didn’t have the advanced customer service setup it has now, serving a smaller user base as an ambitious startup. There were none of the automated tools, well-established procedures, or archives of information that we have today – everything was done manually. Users usually got help by sending in tickets or emails, and each CS agent had to manually take note of each request and deal with all kinds of issues. Without dedicated internal resources or processes, they often needed to ask around internally to find the right information.
Things really started heating up by the end of 2017. In just six months since its launch, Binance became the largest crypto trading platform by trading volume. The capacity of the existing CS team could hardly match this explosive growth. Mindy, a customer service veteran, recalls: “Even with all of us working around the clock, we couldn’t keep up. Sometimes, the queue in the CS system would be hours long.”
In January 2018, Binance had to temporarily stop onboarding new users due to the sheer volume of sign-ups and rapidly increasing demand. Whenever account registrations were reopened, new users would rush in en masse, making the question of when Binance would open registrations again a hot topic in the crypto community.
System pressures
At the end of 2020, the market was quickly picking up again after a period of reduced activity. The resulting surges in traffic caused large pressure loads in Binance’s internal systems, including those underpinning our customer service work. It became clear that the third-party CRM system Binance used at the time couldn’t keep up with the exponential increase in online queries. Consequently, the CS team faced harsh criticism both internally and externally.
While CS agents provide crucial support as the first point of contact, this also means they bear the brunt of vented frustrations, even when the issues have nothing to do with them personally.
Facing this mounting pressure, the CS and Tech team hosted a live AMA and internal training session to help the community better understand the issues they were facing and optimal ways to resolve them.
Dealing with turbulence
As Binance’s user base continued to expand rapidly, pressure kept mounting, both internally and externally. Between the end of 2020 and mid-2021, many CS agents resigned or requested internal transfers due to the pressure and emotional stress of their work.
To help overcome these challenges, Yi He, Binance’s co-founder, temporarily took over the CS department directly in 2021, overhauling its organizational structure and securing resources across other departments. The HR team was instructed to reach out to ex-employees, while current employees got a chance to express their concerns directly to the leadership and the top performers were rewarded. Thanks to these measures, the turnover rate of the CS team began to go down markedly.
Through all these challenges, each team member bore a tremendous weight on their shoulders. Having identified the most urgent problems, Binance pulled together to resolve them and lay the groundwork for the robust systems and frameworks we have today.
AI, Humans, and Systems
Currently, Binance’s CS department supports 17 languages and covers dozens of business sectors. Front-line CS teams are further divided into multiple subgroups based on different products, creating more standardized processes and a comprehensive global service system.
Backed by the internal tools and database, which includes a knowledge base, a training system, and a testing center, it provides a structured process for each CS agent, from onboarding training to daily work inquiries. This system significantly improves efficiency, forming a team capable of supporting tens of millions of users globally.
One proof of this improved systematization is the implementation of self-service tools. When clicking the chat button, users can find options for account reset, identity verification procedures, withdrawal reset, and more in the self-service toolbar. Another improvement has been the introduction of AI bots, helping alleviate many pressures and allowing CS agents to handle more complex and specialized cases.
Today, most user requests are picked up within one minute and resolved within the first CS chat — a huge improvement from the early days when users could wait for hours after they were queued.
Empathy and connection
When facing issues that concern their finances, users still prefer to receive help from human agents – after all, AI can’t empathize with people’s emotions.
Doris, a senior CS agent, says the team understands this urgency and the need for human connection. Even if a complex case can’t be resolved quickly, a CS agent will reply within seconds during the first interactions, letting the user know: "We are here."
Much of the emotional nuance falls between the lines of social interactions, and humans are still much better at understanding that context, providing holistic responses rather than replying to individual sentences and capturing emotional needs keenly to provide comfort.
People’s needs are not only functional but also emotional, and CS agents must be acutely aware of these sensitivities. As Vincent, a senior executive from the CS department, says: "Sometimes, even the difference in the use of a single word in a conversation can dictate whether the user feels they are being treated politely and taken seriously."
The Art of Balance
Binance’s CS team sits right between the company and its users. Whether it is new product launches or adjustments to compliance policies, CS agents are often the first to sense changes within the organization and their potential impact on users. The CS team brings user and community feedback on products and marketing back to the respective departments, leading to improvements through a positive feedback loop.
Binance requires all leaders to undergo customer service training, including spending a full day handling real customer inquiries, followed by two to six hours on the CS rotation each quarter. These responsibilities ensure that user feedback influences product design and business operations from the beginning.
The CS team also impacts other departmental roles and responsibilities. For example, the anti-fraud team has recently expressed gratitude to CS agents who, through their proactive collaborative efforts, have prevented users from transferring funds to external suspicious parties on multiple occasions.
Fund Recovery
Within the CS department’s network lies a special team. Their mission is to handle issues related to users’ deposits not being credited, including identifying underlying reasons and determining whether more information is required from users. In 2022 and 2023, this team addressed nearly four hundred thousand appeals over uncredited deposits, recovering and refunding more than $4.35B worth of digital assets for our users. Among these, unlisted token deposits were one of the most common issues.
These cases require extensive collaboration with wallet and clearing teams, as well as other internal and external stakeholders, to investigate and resolve issues. Since the beginning of these initiatives, Binance has expanded its support from six initial blockchain networks to 16 networks where assets can be retrieved directly, as well as further 16 requiring certain conditions for recovery.
Navigating complexity
In the blockchain realm, particularly in the earlier days, there was somewhat of an informal rule that sending tokens to the wrong address meant those funds were lost. Binance, being among the first crypto players to champion helping users retrieve their tokens, often faced criticism for doing so and questions about its service boundaries. Nonetheless, we powered on.
Still, such initiatives can pose unexpected challenges. Melody, the team lead of the User Appeal team explains that the asset retrieval process is very complex, consuming significant internal resources, and not all mistakes can be corrected. By setting retrieval fees, Binance tries to balance protecting user interests without fostering dependency or the misconception that there are no consequences to erroneous transfers.
Some cases are more complex, requiring tremendous time and resources to figure out, so members of this specialized team find immense satisfaction in each successful asset recovery case. As Melody remarks, "These recovery initiatives are very significant to the user, no matter the amount." The most wonderful feeling is that of pleasantly surprising those who thought their losses were irreversible.
The Right Energy
If you were to sit down for a meal with one of the CS team members and listen to them speak, it would be hard to distinguish the different levels of the team: Binance’s flat organizational style is very conspicuous in its largest department.
More than one team member admits that in the high-pressure environment of their daily work, having supportive, resilient, and skilled colleagues is crucial. A significant reason they stay is because they enjoy the team’s energy. When the market is bustling, and users are active, the workload surges, putting immense pressure on the CS team. Sometimes, an agent might be found tearfully venting to a superior. Yet, after processing their emotions, they collect themselves and soldier on.
Back in the early days of Binance, a CS team veteran recalls calling executives in the middle of the night to help resolve issues. Over time, as the CS department’s systems and workflows improved significantly, the need for constant "firefighting" decreased. Gradually, our CS experts were able to reclaim their personal space and introduce reasonable workload management practices.
Faces Behind the Screen
Just as busy passengers might often overlook airport staff, many crypto users may not realize that the CS agent behind each conversation is a real individual, with their own struggles, complexities, and emotions. They could be a father just back from biking in the park with his kids, a young woman with a love for folk music, or someone known among her friends for her fondness for a particular type of ice cream.
Aware of this reality, our CS agents are motivated less by a prospect of direct recognition than by the pride and joy of being the embodiment of Binance’s user-focused culture and living it daily. Assisting people along their crypto journeys and helping them overcome issues and obstacles standing in their way is one of the hardest jobs in all Binance – but also the most rewarding.