KOHO: 75% Reduction in Contact Volume, Record-Low Contact Rate at Scale

About Koho

KOHO is a fast-growing Canadian fintech serving over 2 million customers. Built entirely digitally, with no branches and no in-person support, KOHO's customer experience is the product. Every interaction a customer has with support is a direct reflection of the platform itself.

From the start, KOHO's model has been built around removing friction: giving Canadians a smarter, simpler relationship with their money through a seamless digital experience. With that as the foundation, KOHO's leadership set a clear north star: scale the business without scaling the cost of support.

That ambition gave Fiona Green, Director of User Success, both the mandate and the opportunity to rethink how CX operated at a structural level.

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A contact rate that grew with the business

During a period of rapid growth, KOHO's inbound contact volume climbed in lockstep with its customer base. The team tried two approaches to break the cycle.

A dedicated CX development team

On paper, it was every CX leader's dream: a tech team reporting directly into support, dedicated to eliminating friction. In practice, it became a bottleneck. Product and marketing began routing their own unresolved product problems through the CX dev team, diffusing its focus and creating a new failure point. After six months, the pilot was scrapped.

Monthly cross-functional meetings with product

The meetings generated detailed voice-of-customer reports, but produced a one-way feedback loop. CX flagged issues; product took notes; nothing reliably made it onto the roadmap. The monthly cadence meant KOHO kept missing the window where product decisions were actually being made.

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"Support volume is not a support team metric. Every contact is a failure in the user journey. Support was absorbing all of that downstream burden."

Fiona Green, Director of User Success, KOHO

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The root problem was not the data. KOHO had good reporting. It was two things: the framing of CX insights for cross-functional partners, and the lack of diagnostic depth underneath broad contact categories.

Manual conversation tagging was inconsistent and too aggregated to be actionable. "Login issues" is a category. It is not a product spec, and it cannot go into a sprint. Product partners kept asking for more specificity. CX had no systematic way to provide it.

HOW BIRDIE HELPED

From contact categories to root causes

KOHO partnered with Birdie to build the diagnostic layer their VoC programme was missing. Using Birdie's platform to analyse customer conversations at scale, the team could move from broad contact categories to specific, actionable sub-issues: the kind of granularity that translates into a product brief, a sprint ticket, and a business case.

The goals were clear:

• Disaggregate high-volume contact categories into their component failure points
• Quantify the business impact of each sub-issue, measured in retention, revenue, and brand terms
• Give product partners something they could act on, not just observe

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Finding the biggest lever

Login and account recovery had grown to represent roughly 25% of all incoming support volume at KOHO. It had been treated as a support problem: a user locked out of their account would hit a dead end in the product journey and be directed to an agent.

But the problem was larger than the tickets suggested. For every customer who contacted support, many more were trying and quietly abandoning the journey altogether, never funding their account, never transacting, churning silently without a trace in the support data.

With Birdie analysing conversations at scale, the team could see past the category label. Inside "login issues" were five or six distinct failure points, each with a different cause, a different user journey, and a different fix. That level of specificity changed what CX could bring to the table entirely.

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"After making progress on the larger levers, Birdie helped us identify and get traction on stubborn contact drivers we had historically struggled to move: the ones that kept showing up but never got prioritised."

Fiona Green, Director of User Success, KOHO

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FROM INSIGHTS TO ACTION

Getting the right people in the room

Armed with a precise diagnosis and a business case framed in retention and revenue terms rather than raw contact volume, KOHO assembled a cross-functional working group: Product, Engineering, Security, and User Success. They booked a co-working space, ran a full-day whiteboard session, and rebuilt the login and account recovery journey from scratch.

CX was not just present. They co-designed the solution.

The outcome was a fully self-served recovery flow. Users who had lost access to their registered phone number could now update it, verify their identity, and regain access entirely within the app, in minutes, without any agent involvement. The flow replicated exactly what agents had been doing manually, just automated and always available.

Volume dropped almost immediately after launch.

A blueprint, not a one-off

The fix solved the immediate problem. But the structural change that followed it was more significant. The working group became a template for how KOHO handles product-CX collaboration going forward.

User Success now has formal sign-off on every product proposal at KOHO. Support requirements are embedded in the design process from day one. The "contact support" fallback is no longer a design default; it requires justification.

As Fiona puts it: gone are the days of an arbitrary "contact support" button as the answer to a journey that hasn't been well thought out.

RESULTS

The numbers

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Key outcomes

• 75% reduction in total inbound contact volume
• Record-low contact rate maintained as the customer base continues to grow
• ~25% of all support volume traced to a single diagnosable root cause (login and account recovery)
• Agent headcount kept flat while volume fell. Same team, meaningfully different work.
• Volume dropped almost immediately after launch: a structural shift, not a seasonal trend
• App store ratings improved; Reddit threads about login friction disappeared
• NPS increased following the self-serve recovery launch
• CSAT rose from 73% to 91%, driven by faster resolution of the login and account recovery friction that had been suppressing scores
• CX is now a required stakeholder in every product design proposal at KOHO

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