A customer once put a question to PiggyVest’s customer success team that was hard to argue with. “Why are you telling me to save, but then you’re also influencing me to spend my money? Are you not contradicting yourself?”
Bukola Willoby answers questions like that for a living. She is Head of Customer Success at PiggyTech Global, the parent company of PiggyVest, a savings and investment app, plus Pocket and PiggyVest Business. Customer success is the team that makes sure people get what they signed up for, from fixing problems to helping them use the product well. Her starting point is blunt: “We are in an industry where trust is very low.”
The job nobody sees until money goes missing
“I think it’s more of firefighting,” she said of her role in her TechCity Conversations interview.
Most people picture something simple. “They just think it’s more like, ‘Oh, I’m sending my money and I’m receiving my money in the bank.’ But what happens when you don’t get your money?” That is where her team comes in, and she says no two weeks look the same.
Her team supports three products with three different jobs. PiggyVest helps people save and invest. Pocket is built for spending. PiggyVest Business serves companies and merchants. “The way I would handle a B2C customer is quite different from how I would handle a B2B customer,” she said, meaning individual customers on one side and businesses on the other.
The hard question: can one company tell you to save and to spend?
Back to that customer. It took a colleague to answer them, she said: “As much as we are trying to influence a healthy saving culture, we’re also trying to tell you that we know life happens,” and Pocket is for those moments.
It’s a fair answer, and still worth keeping in mind. One company benefits from both habits. If you use an all-in-one money app, know which part is doing which job, and set your savings first so spending comes from what’s left.
The same goes for business customers. Her team shows them how to reach their goals, and “apart from that, they also upsell.” Good advice and a sales pitch can arrive in the same conversation. That doesn’t make the advice wrong. It means the question to ask is whether the upgrade fits your goal or theirs.
What a fintech owes you when trust breaks
“So yes, PiggyTech is in a low-trust environment,” she said. “But for us, when trust breaks, the first thing we do is try to be transparent, at least to the best of our ability.”
The second thing is communication. Rather than leaning on a public memo or a post, “we make sure we carry our customers along.” That can mean push notifications, the alerts an app sends to your phone, or an app update that fixes whatever went wrong.
Speed matters because silence gets filled. “Drama sells,” she said. If a customer posts that the app has crashed, “I guarantee you that you would see a thousand retweets on that post.”
Her team also measures how people feel, with two common scores. CSAT, short for customer satisfaction, rates a single experience. Net Promoter Score asks how likely someone is to recommend you. “We use Net Promoter Score to know not just, ‘Oh, you know what, this is what we are doing right,’ but what can we change?” The founders also meet customers at open house events, and she said the company built a feature based solely on feedback from one.
The interview she thought she had lost
Before PiggyVest, she joined a bank straight after NYSC, the one-year national service program for Nigerian graduates. She loved it: dressing up, going to the office, and above all “interacting with customers.”
When someone sent her a PiggyVest job opening, she almost ignored it. It was around the time of MMM, a Ponzi scheme that froze its members’ accounts in December 2016, and another online money platform made her wary. “I just said, ‘Oh, this once again.’” A friend sent it again, she searched the company on Twitter, now X, and decided it was “not bad, not bad.” She applied.
The invitation said business formal. She didn’t know what that meant in tech, so she wore jeans and a blazer. She remembers shaking when she met co-founder Odunayo Eweniyi. At the end she asked what business formal actually meant in the tech world, then slipped into Yoruba on her way out. “So to me, I had fumbled that interview.” The three people interviewing her laughed, explained the dress code, and the offer came soon after.
From a team of five to about 60
When she joined, the customer success team had five people, “inclusive of the co-founder and CMO.” She made six. “I wasn’t even thinking of changing. I was just thinking of learning.”
Around her third month she saw “quite a lot of cracks” and started bringing ideas to the founders, from better tools to new processes. “There was no silly idea,” she said. Within about nine months she was team lead, building separate teams for channels like social media and email.
“I currently have about 60 people on my team now.” Many started as interns. “People are now leaders.” She once tried to count everyone she had helped along the way and stopped at 293.
Her path wasn’t a straight line. As a child she wanted to be a flight attendant, because she always wanted a customer-facing job. “Right now, I’m still doing that, but I’m doing that with customer success money.” She also earned an MBA from Bologna Business School while keeping her job, after taking a plan to her bosses first. “Something had to suffer and that was my sleep.”
Three habits she says the job runs on
Empathy. “It’s one thing to say, oh, how can I be of assistance? But it’s another thing to say, I hear you, I feel your pain and I’m willing to assist you.”
Documentation. Writing down what you do, she said, carries your work into rooms you aren’t in. “That document can speak for you even when you’re not there.”
Communication. “Communication is more about active listening.” That includes reading the tone of a customer’s message, not only the words.
Her advice to anyone starting out is shorter: “Just do you. Focus on you.”
Worth it, but not easy
She admits she once thought the job was easy, a matter of “Thank you for reaching out” and “This has been resolved.” It isn’t. “There are days when I’m like, oh, I got this. There are days when I’m doubting myself.”
“People just see the finished results. They don’t see the process.” Her summary: “It’s worth it, but it’s not easy.”
Puzzles and travel keep it in proportion. Travel, she said, “makes me realize that in the grand scheme of things, we’re just very small.”
What to take from her story
If your money ever goes missing in an app, good support tells you what’s happening before you have to ask, inside the app, and keeps you updated until it’s fixed. If it goes quiet, that tells you something too.
If you want to work in customer success, start with her three habits: write things down, listen for tone, and say “I hear you” before “How can I help?” For more on what trust costs a fintech, watch Aderonke Alex-Adedipe on why startups can’t put off compliance.
