Meet Nicole Clarke: Elevating Chime’s Member Experience Through First Contact Resolution
“I love working in the customer support world because it’s ultimately about problem-solving,” says Nicole Clarke (she/her/hers), Chime’s Senior Program Manager of Core Member Experience. “In member support at ChimeⓇ, our work is to understand the issues our members face, find the best people to work with on a solution to make it right, and address their needs in the moment. There’s a lot of personal satisfaction when, at end of the day, we can find an answer and do the right thing by our members.”
Nicole hasn’t always worked in customer support—in fact, she says she fell into it. After starting her career as a consultant for global financial institutions specializing in regulatory compliance, she moved into payments support at a Big Tech company, where she built a customer support function from the ground up. “Customer support is similar to compliance and regulatory work in that we’re helping people and doing the right thing—and, when things do go wrong, we work to make them right,” she says.
Nicole is part of Chime’s Operations and Member Experience (OMX) team, which we’re highlighting in honor of National Customer Service Week. Read on to learn more about Nicole’s role and the importance of the member experience at Chime.
The role of member obsession in effective issue resolution.
In her role at Chime, Nicole leads Chime’s support escalations team, a group of our most tenured agents who assess and handle complicated legal and compliance issues for members, as well as the first contact resolution metric, which focuses on resolving a member’s issue the first time they reach out to us. “First Contact Resolution is one of our gold star metrics—we want to ensure our members’ issues are taken care of without having to transfer them to another team or contact them again,” she explains.
She loves seeing how her team supports our members: “People are often reaching out to us at a precious moment in their lives—whether they’re sending money to a loved one or paying a bill, for example—and it’s a privilege to be the ones to step in and provide the comfort and resolution they need,” she says.
Elevating the standard for First Contact Resolution.
The Chime Member Experience team’s number one priority is resolving a member’s issue as quickly and frictionlessly as possible. By focusing on improving first contact resolution rates, the team ultimately provides a better experience for members—their issues are resolved faster and with fewer touchpoints. To deliver on their mission, Nicole and her team obsess over making it as easy as possible for members to reach us, as simple as possible to resolve their issue, and to minimize any roadblocks that might slow down the process.
“Members don’t want to be transferred to another line or told that we’ll follow up with them via email—they want their issue resolved right away,” Nicole explains. “Helping them know where to go the first time, whether that’s to self-serve information or contact an agent, can help them move forward faster. It also helps our team as we grow—with more members, we’ll naturally receive more inquiries, so the more efficient we can be, the better we’ll scale both our member and employee experiences.”
To improve first contact resolution rates, Chime has invested heavily in content development and training our agents. “The better our agents can understand our features and possible issues, the more capable they’ll be to give clear and direct answers to our members,” Nicole says. “We spend a lot of resources training our agents and continuing to update and improve our procedures and documentation as new cases come about, so everyone can level up and meet our members where they need us.” In addition, we focus on optimizing our front-line agents' capabilities by providing them with appropriate tools, controls, and permissions to reduce the need for transfers.
Chime has also made changes to how members can get in touch, moving away from email and focusing on phone support and live chat. These allow us to get more real-time information and reduce the back-and-forth. “Most members would prefer to have a continuous conversation on the phone or over chat, and doing so increases their odds of resolving their issue on the first try,” Nicole says.
Nicole and the broader OMX team have also impacted Chime’s products, bringing common member questions or issues to the forefront so that, when possible, we can build better products and services to avoid such issues altogether. For example, one of the highest contact reasons is direct deposit information; members can now view their direct deposit status in the Chime app and better understand when their money will arrive.
And as Chime releases more products, features, and services—whether they’re driven by OMX input or others—Nicole and the OMX team work tirelessly to provide more information about Chime updates to members. “We have an OMX representative for every feature or service who works with the Product team to give feedback on what they’re hearing from members,” she explains. “They help inform what the feature should look like and design how agents will support the new feature, too.”
Over the past year, Nicole is proudest of her team’s progress in raising the First Contact Resolution rates and the OMX organization’s constant commitment to improving the member experience.
“I’m excited to continue finding the right channels on which to serve our members and providing our team with better ways to support our members,” Nicole says. “We’re constantly striving to improve the member experience, and we keep unlocking even better ways to do so.”
