Betterment is aiming to become more customer-focused in the coming year, according to a post by the firm’s Founder and CEO, Jon Stein. Describing 2018 as a year dedicated to listening to feedback from customers, advisors and employers who use the company’s investing solutions, Stein said he wanted to make the “customer-centricity tangible” in 2019.
In laying out the coming year’s roadmap, Stein noted that Betterment had made several improvements in 2018, including upgrading its customer service and building out a catalog of insights from questions and concerns raised by users. Call hold times and email response times, for example, were reduced by 80 percent from earlier in the year, he reported in the post. Developers and engineers interacted with technical help questions, as part of a “customer experience week.” At least one new feature came from that interaction, with John Mileham, the firm’s VP of architecture, building out an automatic password generator for the customer experience team.
The firm also sought to clarify its organizational structure as Betterment grew to 250 employees last year. Employees wanted to see “clear and simple lines of ownership, accountability, and approval,” for “each of the experiences” Betterment customers encountered, according to a company spokesperson, so Stein decided to assign a top executive to oversee each.
In the coming year users should expect to see improvements in Betterment’s mobile product, promised Stein. “Our mobile experience is not where we want it to be,” he wrote. “Almost 70% of [customer] logins are on a mobile device, and too much of Betterment’s functionality isn’t yet available there.”
2019 is also gearing up to be the year of financial planning, with Stein intent on delivering “stronger context and information” to the company’s financial planning offerings. Cash management will also see more attention, with the company planning to help clients with their savings and financial habits.
Betterment reported over $14 billion in assets under management, with over 450,000 accounts, according to its most recent regulatory filing.