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 Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Robert Frost, VP, Customer Care

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

Carbonite Customer Care underwent a transformation in 2014 with newly hired Vice President, Robert Frost. The transformation was so profound, that I feel the world should know. My name is Brett Siedman, Senior Director at Carbonite Customer Care. I have spent >16 years in every facet of the Customer Service Industry, including auditing centers around the world as an Executive Consultant. Bottom line, I know a World Class Executive when I encounter one.

Why is Robert Frost the best Executive? Let me make it very simple. He cares about people—employees as well as customers. People trust him. In fact, I have never seen Employee OR Customer Satisfaction so high in any organization I have worked—for a highly technical support organization, I doubt any company in the world can beat our numbers!

Robert Frost started right at the end of 2013. His first statement was profound: “Good is not good enough—you should either be the best in the world at what you do or work tirelessly towards that end.” At this time, many of our employees were dissatisfied, underpaid, under informed, underappreciated and frequently, the wrong fit for their role. Robert made a strategic decision to be an extremely employee focused contact center, understanding that the customer is #1 but the most powerful way to the customer is through the agent. Under Robert’s direction, we drove morale, and helped our agents become better prepared for success through several concerted efforts, such as revamping our hiring to attract candidates that had a higher chance of success in our culture, a complete redesign of our Quality Program to focus on improving and less focus on “dinging” agents, a complete Training revamp that offered more advanced training to meet the needs of our increasingly technical customer-base, established mentor roles to help struggling agents, and added a plethora of morale events and recognition programs including high dollar awards around CSAT, many grand events, game rooms, VP luncheons with agents, and generous morale budgets for all teams. These initiatives ended up paying for themselves in increased productivity. Due to Robert’s focus on the agent, our customers could “hear” the agent’s smile through the phone!

Even though Rob drove our CSAT to new heights of 94% (Likert scale, top 2 box), he did not settle. As 6% of our customers were still dissatisfied, Rob wanted to know why, so he had a bold idea and conceptualized a team that would advocate for 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 and a team was created called the Carbonite Service Recovery Unit (CSRU). Customers that gave a dissatisfied rating were contacted by this team and 94% of all customers engaged by CSRU went from Dissatisfied to Satisfied, or Very Satisfied—many of them are now brand advocates. Since the launch of this team there has been a sharp drop off in social media complaints and brand damaging web comments/reviews spawned from dissatisfied customers, effectively ending end-user dissatisfaction for those that contact our support team.

With Robert’s leadership, we won 2014 Best Places to Work in Maine, 2015 Bronze Stevie Award for Contact Center of the Year, and are a finalist for ICMI’s Global Contact Center Award.

Overall, Customer Care has been the jewel of Carbonite in 2014. Our Sales team sells our service as a differentiator, customer churn greatly reduced and engineering relies on our taxonomy to improve our products. We’ve improved marketing materials which lowered contact rates, and are committed to enabling success in every function with our talent, data and willingness to partner for the betterment of the company, Customer and shareholder. There is NO DOUBT in my mind that Robert should be named Customer Service Executive of the Year.

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

Significant Customer Service KPIs and milestones from January, 2014 to present:

• Maintained an elite Customer Satisfaction rating of 94% (against an industry Benchmark of 85%) throughout the year (Note: CSAT was 78% in October 2013)
• Very Satisfied (top box) improved to 86.9%, 20 points higher than the industry benchmark
• Wait time improved from 280 seconds to 20 seconds
• Abandon % improved from 22.3% to 1.7%
• Service Level goal of 80/60 improved from 27% to 88%
• Email resolution improved from 78% to 94%
• Internal Client Satisfaction (Sales) went from 56% to 81% satisfied with Support
• Employee NPS went from -19% to +50%
• Monthly attrition dropped from an annualized 78% to 20%
• Started “upselling” pilot program in December. Satisfaction for customers where an upsell was attempted is currently at 97.7% Overall Satisfied. Last month we produced $182k of additional sales for a >$2M run rate, with no additional funding for the project.