Building a seamless payment experience for millions of Indians

PhonePe recently crossed the 250 million user milestone and also emerged as the largest player on UPI transactions. With over 100 Mn monthly active users, we now have one of the largest transacting user bases in the country. And we’ve come a long way, proudly serving millions of users across 500 cities in India.

Besides great tech capabilities, a simple and intuitive product flow, and the addition of new products and features, customer experience is the backbone of why customers use us everyday. We have gone beyond just customer satisfaction to make every payment experience on our app a delightful one for our customers. Here’s how we do it!

Digital payment adoption for Bharat

We are widely accepted as a payment option across the country. In what is a true testimony to our penetration and vast user base, around 80% of our customers come from tier 2, 3, and beyond. Familiarity with digital payments in these sectors is still low, with anxiety around trust, safety, security, and reliability.

During our customer interactions, we realised that a lot of our users are also first-time internet users and our job was not only to help them make payments easily, but also to hand-hold them through their journey towards becoming digitally savvy.

With these insights in mind, we heavily invested into building systems and processes that gave us deeper understanding of customer behavior patterns across user segments, locations, devices and payment categories. Through these efforts, we also identified important aspects contributing to both delightful and frustrating experiences on our app. We then took a tech and data-first approach to resolve friction points that surfaced during our in-depth research.

Our app speaks your language

Many of our customers prefer using the app in their native language. Keeping this in mind, we offer help and support services in 8 Indian languages. Besides regional language telephonic support, we now also offer language selection for the app, the help section, and for chat support. The response to our localization efforts have been overwhelming with more and more customers to opting to use the app in a language they are comfortable with.

We are here to help!

A lot of users are hesitant to use digital payments simply due to the lack of awareness about the various aspects of how UPI payments work which includes basics like creating a VPA, setting your BHIM UPI PIN, linking bank accounts, etc. We have created easy-to-understand help articles and educational videos in multiple languages for smoother customer on-boarding. We are also constantly adding more imagery and visual media to help users on the app. We have also partnered with product and business teams, and are continually working on reducing our support contact rate, which is under a very impressive 0.5% today.

Instant issue resolution with automation

We provide resolutions to 90% customer issues right away and are always working to better this number. We have automated our support systems to allow customers to easily track their payment issues on the app and get instant responses. This allows customers to troubleshoot their problems without having to wait to get to a customer support executive. We have also ensured that we maintain complete transparency while providing resolutions to customers. Today, around 80% of all issues are covered through automated portal experiences and phone IVR with improving support satisfaction scores, and we believe that we can improve this further. We make sure that customers hear back from us within a few hours for any issues they are facing.

Building for the future

We continue to learn everyday from our customers. We are constantly incorporating the feedback that we get into designing experiences that will deliver the best payment experience for users across India.