Pigeon Loans is a platform for people to make and manage loans with each other. In the US, people loan about $200 billion to friends, neighbors, and relatives every year. Unfortunately, these loans often are a source of strife, hurt feelings, and broken relationships.
Pigeon Loans manages repayments and serves as an impartial, third-party source of truth for peer-to-peer loans. In three months, Pigeon has grown to over 15,000 users.
Pigeon’s first employee and Director of Business Relations Ben Schein leads the efforts to answer questions, support users, and understand what users need from Pigeon’s platform.
Part of Pigeon’s responsibility is to help users move from intent — wanting to lend to a friend or family member — into actual loan as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, with Pigeon’s app stack, it was difficult for them to understand where and why customers were getting stuck in their loan process.
In order to get better visibility into their customers’ journey, immediately following launch, Ben turned to Atlas for session recording and email support. Some of his favorite features: being able to see screen recordings in the same chat where he’s responding to a user.
What’s his favorite feature? “I love having the visibility of the screen recording of the customer in the same chat where I am interacting with and responding to the users,” Schein says.
And Schein may be taking the lead on customer success — but he knows that customer success isn’t just one person’s job, it’s the whole team’s. Atlas’s Slack integration helps make it easy for a small team to handle support tickets, allowing him to quickly get input from the rest of the team when necessary. “It works really well for our workflow,” Schein says.
A typical support ticket for Pigeon is usually in one of a few categories. There’s product workflow questions. Pigeon captures an e-signature workflow, where one person can sign an agreement, but be waiting for a counter-party to also sign. Sometimes, at that point, the first user will reach out to support.
There are product capability questions: users and prospective users often reach out with questions around what Pigeon does and whether it supports a particular type of loan or repayment schedule.
There are bug and usability questions: users run into a bug, or something they think is a bug, and reach out to get un-stuck. Ben has found that when two people come to Pigeon to make their loan, the more tech-savvy one tends to take the lead and help guide their friend or family member through the rest of the process.
In these situations, Ben leans on Atlas session recordings — by viewing the counter-party’s session recording, (without ever having received a ticket), Ben can identify that, for example, they might be uncertain which information to enter. This enables Ben to quickly respond to the original user, without having to ping their counter-party, reducing the mean time to resolve tickets.
In addition, Ben leans on Atlas’s canned response feature — storing responses to several common questions about product capabilities to provide users comprehensive answers faster.
Not all loans are equal, of course. While some customers use Pigeon Loans to help with bills or unexpected expenses, others choose the platform to facilitate some of life’s biggest financial events — such as buying a home, or starting a business. Pigeon has found that these customers tend to have higher feature requests and often require a higher level of support.
Atlas has helped them better serve — as well as close — these customers. For example, one prospective customer was making a $60k loan to a less-tech-savvy relative to help them with a home purchase, Ben could see both sides of the transaction, and guide them through the process.
“I was ready to put on an Atlas hoodie that day,” Ben laughs. “We’re huge fans.”
Ben Schein, not wearing an Atlas hoodie yet :)
