Company: Central Desktop, Pasadena, CA
Company Description: Central Desktop helps people work together in ways they never imagined possible. Our SocialBridge collaboration platform connects people and information in the cloud, making it possible to share files, combine knowledge, inspire ideas, manage projects and more. Central Desktop serves half a million users worldwide. Founded in 2005, Central Desktop is headquartered in Pasadena, CA.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year

Nomination Title: Central Desktop's Customer Experience Department

Tell the story about what this nominated organization/department achieved since January 1 2011 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Central Desktop proudly celebrated its highest customer satisfaction ratings and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) of all time in 2011. Our overall NPS grew from 30% in early 2011 to a peak of 53% by end of year. This places Central Desktop in the same impressive club within our industry as Adobe (NPS of 46%).

Throughout 2011, Central Desktop rolled out an expansive customer-centric strategy focused on making raving fans of our product and people. Additionally, our average customer satisfaction score, as captured via survey upon completion of all service-related engagements, topped 9.5 out of 10 by the end of 2011. The score blends the satisfaction rating across professionalism, timeliness, courtesy, technological knowledge and quality.

To achieve these results, our organization needed to take a meaningful step away from how we were supporting our customers and where we struggled. Our main challenge: we lacked a cohesive, company-wide focus on satisfaction. So we built a customer maturity model to guide our entire organization and each stakeholder’s responsibility in cultivating raving fans. This model allowed us to define opportunities to win or fail our 500,000+ users and gave us a unified, consistent message and approach to how we service customers.

Throughout 2011, we rolled out additional resources to promote sustainable user adoption and satisfaction, foster a vibrant user community and enable more personal interactions, including:

• Customer Bill of Rights: A set of guiding principles and commitments we make to customers.
• Ideasphere: An online user feedback portal that provides direct access to our product team. Customers can submit feature request ideas, vote up and down the priority of other users’ ideas and gain improved visibility to our product roadmap.
• Expanded set of communication tools: LiveChat and self-service customer portal
• Advanced metric reporting: Internal tools to get immediate access to the health of our service organization and allow for rapid recovery around any service-related failure
• User community calls: An ongoing series of online user-focused calls where customers casually interact with one another and gain tips and best practices.
• SuccessStart implementation methodology: A comprehensive implementation process that pairs an exhaustive toolkit of rollout tools and a dedicated collaboration strategist with each of our Enterprise and SocialBridge customers.
• Annual user conference: We launched our first-ever annual user conference. Bringing in users nationwide and as far as China, this two-day event provided a venue for advanced training, one-on-one speed consulting and the latest collaboration strategies from other customers and analysts.

What customers say:

• “Your process and approach really makes me feel like I have a partner in this configuration and that I understand how to tackle this implementation. Thanks for being so great!”
• “This is one of the first times I have dealt with CD's support. And all I can say is WOW!”
• “I love how the rep knew who I was as soon as I stated my name!”
• “The quality of technical support is excellent. It was one of the reasons Central Desktop was our choice.”

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated organization/department:

Mark Fordham is the director of services at Central Desktop, overseeing all customer experience efforts. Mark has 12 years of experience in strategic client and product management as well as software implementation leadership.
Previously, Mark served as director of implementation services at NEOGOV where he led the company's fledgling customer experience efforts from infancy into a thriving enterprise of scalable and profitable service delivery. Mark also worked at Advantage Sales and Marketing where he oversaw the expansion of the client services and operations team to a $100M enterprise. Mark holds a bachelor's degree from Biola University.