Team

Delivering World-Class Support Through Continuous Innovation at Konfir

Hear from our Head of Operations to understand how we leverage technology to help maintain our speed and efficiency targets, ensure ease of use, and high conversion rates

As pioneers in instant employment and income verifications, our mission is to provide outstanding support to clients and applicants in various industries, including background screening, recruitment, tenant referencing, and financial services. We are dedicated to ensuring a smooth, secure, and accurate verification experience.

We also understand that employment and income verification often occurs during significant life events, such as starting a new job, renting a flat, or applying for credit. These can be stressful times, and we take our responsibility seriously to provide seamless support that helps applicants feel in control when sharing their data.

In this blog post we hear from our Head of Operations, Hope Latham, to understand key challenges Konfir faced when creating a best-in-class applicant support journey and how we leverage technology to help maintain our speed and efficiency targets to ensure ease of use and high conversion rates.

Innovating for World-Class Support

Since our very first verification in mid-2022, we have focused on three core areas to ensure an excellent experience for our clients and applicants, all while fostering a culture of continuous improvement:

  1. Listening and Learning: Acting on Feedback and Data
  2. Prioritising Speed and Efficiency
  3. Ensuring Transparency and Clarity

These efforts have driven significant improvements:

Early 2023 Now
Applicant contact rates 15% 3%
Applicant satisfaction (CSAT) 76% 88%
Trustpilot star rating 3.9 4.3

We've also seen a substantial increase in applicant uptake, with up to 92% of applicants completing our verification journey for our top-performing clients, compared to under the 60% they experience with traditional methods such as Contact-Previous-Employer References.

1. Listening and Learning: Acting on Feedback and Data

From day one, we’ve placed our applicants and clients at the centre of everything we do. By continuously gathering and acting on feedback and trends spotted in data, we strive to make our product and support journey clear, transparent, and applicant-friendly.

We do this through:

  • Regular feedback sessions with clients to understand challenges.
  • Detailed monitoring and categorisation of applicant contact reasons and satisfaction survey results.
  • Cross-team communication to review feedback and implement changes.
  • A test-and-learn culture to quickly address applicant challenges.
  • Encouraging our engineering and product teams to engage directly with applicant and client support, fostering a deeper understanding of applicant needs.

In Action: In December 2023, we noticed that 18% of inbound applicant contact in the month was related to tax data connection issues. After gathering more detailed feedback and having our team members experience the journey themselves, we implemented several improvements:

  • Created video guides and step-by-step instructions for common tax data issues.
  • Updated the applicant journey to identify when these issues are occurring in real time
  • Presented the video and written guides to applicants facing the issue 
  • Enhanced help centre information.
These changes reduced tax-related contacts by over half, bringing the rate down to <8% of inbound (which overall represents less than 1% of applicants).

2. Prioritising Speed and Efficiency

We know that when applicants reach out for support, they need quick and effective assistance, especially during stressful times. We respond to 100% of requests within three hours, and resolve 99.8% of queries within a day. This commitment to speed and efficiency is vital to build and maintain trust with our applicants.

Key Innovations:

  • AI Help Centre: Recently upgraded, our AI now solves over 90% of queries and links applicants to helpful resources. Our agents continuously refine this tool to improve its accuracy and expand its capabilities. This means applicants can get instant answers, instead of waiting for agent support.
  • Journey Improvements: By feeding applicant insights back to our product team, we solve issues within the product itself before they affect applicants.
  • Automation: Automating manual support tasks has sped up processes, reduced errors, and allowed us to handle more verifications without increasing team size.

3. Ensuring Transparency and Clarity

As we revolutionise employment and income verification, building trust through transparency is crucial. We ensure that applicants feel in control of their data and understand each step of the process.

Our Commitment:

  • Clear communication at every stage of the applicant journey.
  • Simple, accessible language.
  • Emphasising applicant control over data connections.
  • Full transparency about what data is being shared.

By prioritising these principles, we not only solve problems but also build confidence and trust in our service.

In Action: To ensure we’re meeting these principles, we complete an annual accessibility assessment as part of our certification against the UK Government’s Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework. We are also in the process of testing all our Help Centre content, communication templates and platform copy to ensure that it is readable with a reading age of 9 (the average reading age in the UK) and are working to implement the Consumer Duty principles outlined by the FCA, ensuring consumer understanding. Our approach to listening and learning outlined in 1. ensures that we continue to identify any gaps in our transparency and clarity where applicants are unsure and implement changes to solve this.

Whilst 2. Speed and Efficiency is important to us, we ensure to balance it with 3. Transparency and Clarity, always considering what our applicants need by incorporating principle 1. Listen and Learn. You can read more about how this approach comes to life in our blog ‘Why more friction isn’t always a bad thing’, where we discuss how adding in an extra step to explain how we handle banking transaction data in plain English for applicants resulted in an uplift in conversion despite the introduction of an additional step. 

The addition of the first screen resulted in a 4% uplift in applicants connecting Open Banking

Conclusion

Konfir’s continuous innovation and commitment to world-class support have significantly improved our service metrics and applicant satisfaction. By listening to feedback, prioritising speed and efficiency, and ensuring transparency, we have set new standards in the industry. As we continue to grow, we remain dedicated to anticipating and meeting the needs of our applicants.