Company: Carbonite, Inc., Lewiston, ME
Company Description: Carbonite (Nasdaq:CARB) is a leading provider of hybrid backup (cloud and local) and recovery solutions for home users and businesses. Carbonite offers a comprehensive suite of affordable services for data protection, recovery and anywhere, anytime access.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Carbonite Service Recovery Unit: Taking Customer Satisfaction to a New Level

Tell the story about what this nominated team has achieved since January 1, 2014 year (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Early in 2014, our Vice President of Carbonite Customer Care, Robert Frost, tasked us to shape our call center into a World Class customer service delivery machine. First came a total redesign of the contact center. This involved improving all of our customer and employee engagement strategies. This was no small feat and led to 94% Overall Customer Satisfaction (Likert scale, top 2-box) and 87% Very Satisfied (top box).

Unfortunately, 6% of customers were still dissatisfied with their experience with Carbonite Customer Care. Rob wanted to know why, so he had a bold idea and conceptualized a dedicated team that would advocate as the voice of the customer. Our mission was clear: Uncover every instance of dissatisfaction and give it our best second effort to learn from and resolve it, from the customer’s perception. That is when the concept of “No Customer Left Behind” was born—he called this team the Carbonite Service Recovery Unit (CSRU).

The CSRU story begins with two veteran support representatives that were hand-picked for their attention to detail, passion for the brand, and focus on a seamless customer experience. They were tasked to read and deeply research every negative survey that was submitted to Carbonite. The team’s focus:

• Research all dissatisfied surveys and document what the customer experienced
• Reach out to customers with outstanding issues and resolve them
• Learn what can be done to prevent future dissatisfaction for reoccurring issues
• Improve our products and processes by providing data to key stakeholders
• Identify agent error and providing specific data for agent coaching

The CSRU team has access to all departments within Carbonite. The team is able to pinpoint specific drivers that consistently cause dissatisfaction. They then report these findings directly to our Executives, Engineering, Product Management, Quality and Training Teams. This data is reported daily, weekly and monthly. As a company, we use this feedback to drive meaningful change efficiently and effectively—not only does this outreach make for a better customer experience, it also drives improvement throughout the company. This has resulted in significant changes that have contributed to reducing overall customer dissatisfaction.

Most companies realize that customer feedback is valuable. However, prior to our CSRU team, Carbonite, like many other companies, did little or nothing to reach out to the dissatisfied customers. Rob Frost challenged the CSRU team to not only “wear the hat of the owner” but to put themselves in the “customer’s shoes.” The CSRU Customer Care team has built the tools and relationships within Carbonite that allow them to sow the seeds of an idea and then to cultivate the positive results which benefit customers and the bottom line, directly. Most importantly, they engage customers who were left with the impression that their issue was not resolved, or that we didn’t care. The goal is to leave each dissatisfied customer with a positive experience ensuring that “No Customer is Left Behind.”

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominated team since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

Customer Outreach
• Overall Dissatisfaction (bottom 2 box) reduced from 6.33% to 4.31% (>30% decrease)
• 94% of all customers engaged by CSRU have gone from Dissatisfied to Satisfied, or Very Satisfied—many of them are now brand advocates.

Product Improvement
• Identified confusion with product’s Restore function and partnered with Engineering to improve. Contributed directly to a redesign, resulting in a potential contact avoidance savings of $1.3M annually.
• Identified issues accepting payment from Customers that resulted in simplified credit card handling processes, enabling less friction in both new customer acquisition and renewals.

Process Improvement
• Drove creation of >400 unique KB articles that previously didn’t exist and addressed issues driving contacts and dissatisfaction.

Agent Follow-up
• Out of 3900 surveys, 846 agent level quality issues identified that led to custom coaching being delivered to over 260 agents

Data Gathering/Reporting
• Reviewed >3900 dissatisfied submissions and reported results in actionable buckets to all internal key stakeholders