Interview: AMP-backed Citro takes a unique approach to customer acquisition and service

Ash Frenken is the dynamic Managing Director of Citro, a rapidly growing financial services startup backed by AMP. Under the motto, “get the most our of your second act”, Citro serves a 50+ demographic and has a unique spin on customer acquisition and experience. Read more in this insightful interview!

Can you share what the Citro Card is all about?

Citro is a content, community and rewards platform specifically tailored for Australians and now, Kiwis over 50. Backed by AMP, we offer advice, inspiration, education and rewards to our rapidly growing membership of over 150,000 aged 50+ members. Members receive exclusive access to rewarding offers, inspiring stories and weekly deals with attractive cash back offers.

The Citro Rewards Visa Card is a Rewards Debit Card, that gives Aussies over 50 access to up to 20% cashback at over 200 leading brands across Australia. It takes just a couple of minutes for members to sign up via the Citro app and link their Citro card to their existing Australian enabled bank account. Citro members can then tap and pay at almost anywhere where Visa is accepted in the world, using their own money from their existing bank account with no transaction fees, worldwide. Although members can enjoy the simplicity and security of paying with the Citro card almost anywhere Visa is accepted, it’s really about the cashback rewards that Citro members receive when transacting with our 200+ national partners.

What are the unique considerations of serving a 50s+ demographic?

The over 50s demographic is an underserved segment in both Australia and New Zealand and has needs when it comes to getting the most out of life as they plan significant life style changes as they approach retirement age.

Retirement is no longer about simply going grey, the aged pension and planning on which retirement home you’ll live in – it’s truly something to look forward to. Over 50s are living longer, are healthier and wealthier than we’ve ever been. And many as they enter their 50s and 60s, they’re going to go through a significant change as they transition into a stage of life where perhaps kids have moved out of home and are no longer financially dependent, and the focus on their career is becoming a lesser priority than perhaps it was in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Our content and community platform is set up specifically to help Australians over 50 make that transition, and optimise their lifestyle, health and finances for this next stage of life.

The key focus for Citro has been to:

provide useful, original content for our community, tailored for the pre-retiree and early-stage retiree segment (50- 65)
build a rewards program with reputable partners that provide our members with ways to action the inspiration that they receive from our content, with truly rewarding cashback offers that help them get more out of their money
build integrated product features on our Rewards Visa Debit card that enable them to contribute towards their retirement, in an effortless way. Recently, we released a new product feature that allows our members, to choose to invest their cashback rewards into any nominated superfund, as a personal contribution. Soon we’ll also be releasing transaction roundups that allow members to configure their Citro card to ‘round up’ the transaction amount to a pre-configured amount, and supercharge their superannuation by investing those roundups into their nominated superfund.
build a user-friendly app, that’s specifically tailored around the needs of our target demographic and is customer-feedback led. Typically, a lot of the newer financial services apps are built to suit a wide demographic, and typically take more of a lead to the Millenials and Gen Z, who are often more frequent users of online or app based solutions to manage their finances. With solely over 50s in our focus, we have the luxury to focus exclusively on the needs of this demographic in our tech build, rather than a ‘one-size fits all’ approach. Examples of this have included accessibility and the colours we use, size of text, buttons and even implementing guided user flows to really make sure our members feel as supported as possible in using the Citro App as a tool for signing up to, and managing, their Citro Rewards Card.

How did you go about evaluating offshore service providers and models?

While Citro’s adopted a product-led growth strategy, providing exceptional support and service to our customers from real humans when they need, it was a key requirement from the outset, so when we’re considering the options for evaluating how we best do that today, and as we scale, we considered both onshore insourced models as well as outsourced offshore solutions.

Ultimately, we felt that an offshore solution was going to give us the best capability to maximise the human support and care we could offer to our customers as we scale.

This human support was something we knew was important to our target customer, and heading down purely chatbot or email ticket support capabilities would likely be a major mistake as we seek to build ourselves as a trusted brand, synonymous with retirement in both Australian and New Zealand.

Whilst I have had an extensive amount of experience in setting up and scaling call centre/customer support operations both onshore and offshore, things change quickly and it was important to me to get the trusted expert support of someone who lives and breathes this industry everyday – which is why I reached out to Sharon from Matchboard.

There were several key considerations going into selecting our chosen offshore service provider, who would be critical to the success of our business. Two of the leading considerations were:

Local accent and how the accent of the person influences how our customers’ willingness to openly engage and trust the person on the end of the phone that’s there to help. To understand our customer preferences between, invested in a lot of user acceptance testing, testing specific accents with anonymous Citro users for which they preferred the best. What was particularly surprising, is from the three shortlisted countries, there was a landslide preference towards one in particular – Fiji.
Selecting an offshore service provider that was happy with us being ‘hands-on’. As we’re a relatively new business with a rapidly evolving product, and operational processes, retaining the ability to be exceptionally hands-on with our offshore team, was a non-negotiable. As opposed to a large scale established business, that perhaps might look for a ‘set and forget’ approach, we wanted our offshore team to be an extension of our onshore team, and to have maximum control and involvement in the selection, training and performance management of those team members. It was only after interviewing a number of shortlisted candidates, that we found a smaller BPO, with hands-on directors, that was going to be a great fit for our stage of growth.
Other important considerations were:
- cultural differences and understanding of Australian culture and way of life
- the demographic of the workforce, and how that aligned to understanding the specific needs our customer, given they are all over 50
- time zone and how this may impact our ability to support our offshore team, or their ability to support our customer
- travel distance. We intended visiting our team frequently, so long haul international flights and travel times were going to make that much more challenging.
Ebook: Cost of Outsourcing in Fiji

As a young company, customer acquisition is key for momentum. Which channel is your most effective?

Whilst backed by a heritage financial services brand in AMP, Citro is a stand-alone new brand in market, and we’re bringing a new and exciting product to Australians over 50. That means we’ve had to think outside the box when it comes to the way we have marketed and positioned the product.

We’ve recently enjoyed a lot of success, through influencer (or brand-ambassador) led marketing, by engaging several Australia celebrities and personalities to create short instructional, benefit-led marketing videos that we then use to promote on social media (largely Facebook) and more recently we ran a very successful free-to-air TV campaign in Brisbane. Naturally, all our brand ambassadors are Aussies over 50, and have included:

cricket legend, Glenn McGrath
Olympic swimming legend, Susie O’Neill
TV personality, Denise Drysdale
long standing TV presenter and Ch9 Getaway host, David Reyne
TV and stage show icon, Patti Newton… and many more.

What we’ve found to be the key elements to the success of this strategy have been:

alignment of our relatively new brand and product with brand ambassadors that are trusted by our target demographic
production of creative assets that not only talk to the features and benefits of the Citro rewards card and community, but also explain and demonstrate the simplicity of the sign-up process, aiming to reduce any apprehension of signing up for a financial product, via an app, which is perhaps something quite new for our target demographic
creation of an engaging, creative asset that is distributed via channels where our target customers spend their time (ie. Facebook).

Which KPIs are most important to you and why?

There are many that we’re focused on, however right now, we are particularly focused on supporting our Citro card members to get the most out of their Citro Rewards Visa Debit Card membership. Specifically, we’re looking at the total number of transactions and per cardholder spend that occurs within our partner network where our customers earn cashback rewards, and ultimately where Citro derives most of its revenue.

Naturally, NPS and customer satisfaction are also extremely high on our radar, and making sure we’re delivering on the expectation of our members. I’m proud to say that, with just over a year in operation, we’ve managed to maintain a very impressive NPS score, currently sitting at +39.

Last updated on: December 26, 2024