Getting help at Luno

Maybe you’re new to Bitcoin (or Luno) and you’re just not completely sure of how things work. Maybe you’re one of our early customers, with a very technical question. Either way, the Luno Community Team is here to help you.

At some point, you may need to get in touch with us. Our goal is to make that experience as smooth as possible. This guide is to help empower you with some tips how to speed things up.

Bitcoin growth

As you may have noticed, Bitcoin (and Luno) has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few months.

Bitcoin has become so popular, in fact, that there are more people using the network worldwide than what it was designed to handle (luckily there are some improvements underway). Every day there are more uses for Bitcoin; more people, institutional investors and banks that understand it; more positive press; and many positive industry developments, truly the next step in the evolution of money.

This is great news, as we’re already seeing Bitcoin’s potential impact in the world of finance.

What comes with that, however, is the fact that we can’t always immediately respond to your questions. This is unfortunate: we love helping our customers. It’s not just something that we have to do, something we like to do. But, when Bitcoin’s popularity and new customer sign ups grow faster than what we can hire and grow the Community Team, it leads to delays and frustrations.

We understand: it’s super frustrating, and we’re really sorry about the amount of time it may have taken recently for us to get back to you.

We are working around the clock to clear any backlogs and we’re also hiring aggressively. To give context: our ticket volume has more than doubled in three months and no matter how fast we’re hiring, it’s nearly impossible to double your staff size in such a short amount of time.

This article is not just to explain the situation, but also to empower you with a few tips on the best way get your questions answered, as quickly as possible ?

Tips for faster support

Tip #1: Visit the Help Centre and the Learning Portal

If you are very new to Bitcoin, head over to the Learning Portal. You’ll find a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know about Bitcoin ranging from what it is, how the price is determined, and some of the best ways to keep your Bitcoin safe.

Visit the Learning Portal

Our Help Centre covers all questions you may have related to the Luno platform, including:

• Buying or selling Bitcoin
• Using Bitcoin
• Security
• The Luno basics
• Identity verification
• Deposits and withdrawals

Visit the Help Centre

Tip #2: Only send one ticket, please

We spend a lot of time each day looking at tickets, which you can submit via email, the Help Centre or our mobile apps.

It slows our response time down if you send in multiple tickets relating to the same question. It also has a knock-on effect and slows us down in getting to other customers’ questions. We understand: it’s frustrating when you don’t get a quick reply. But we do review and reply to each and every ticket and sending more than one duplicate ticket doesn’t speed it up.

For example: during July this year, we spent over 14 hours just closing duplicate tickets. That’s a lot of time wasted, where we could instead have responded to your questions.

Tip #3: Send all relevant information

We understand the urge to send a quick email: you have a seemingly simple issue and you want it resolved (and sent) as fast as possible.
It will, however, speed up the process a lot (and potentially avoid a long back-and-forth, where we request additional information) if you add some more information to the ticket.

Exhibit A: a bad ticket ?

Exhibit B: a great ticket ?

Bonus points ?

We go wild for a well structured mail. Throw in a few numbered points, mention what you were expecting to see (and what you actually saw) and we’ll be high fiving you through the screen.

Tip #4: Be patient when depositing money

Bitcoin platforms like Luno and customers like you have to rely on the existing banking infrastructure. In some cases, various banks and platforms all need to communicate and settle with each other, and this can sometimes lead to delays. Whereas transfers between some banks settle very quickly, in many cases it can take up to two days for a deposit to show in your Luno account.

If your deposit still hasn’t cleared in 48 hours, please contact us for help, along with some relevant information: the email address associated with the Luno account, proof of payment, and any other relevant information. We’ll track it down from there and assign it to your account as soon as possible.

Three very important things to remember about deposits:

1. You can only deposit money from your own bank account
2. Always include your unique reference number (starting with BX) in any reference, comment or remark field that your banking platform shows
3. Avoid making multiple deposits for the exact same amount on the same day

Summary

To repeat: we’re aware of the growing pains that come with serving an industry that is growing as fast as ours, and we’re working hard to fix it. Not just in the short term — by working longer, harder and smarter — but also in the long term. We’ve already welcomed and trained 11 additional Community Team members this year (and we’re still hiring), we’ve greatly increased our KYC (know-your-customer) document verification capacity, and we’ve introduced multiple automations to help us prioritise and speed things up.

We also have a comprehensive list of metrics — ticket resolution time, account verification time, customer satisfaction, NPS, hiring funnels and more. We’re working hard to incrementally improve each and every one of these over time.

Thanks to all our customers bearing with us during this busy period as we’re scaling and working on products that will change the future of finance.

To the moon ?