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Vend, San Francisco, CA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Vend, San Francisco, CA
Company Description: Vend is revolutionizing retail with its cloud-based point-of-sale and retail platform. Loved by over 15,000 stores worldwide, in over 150 countries, Vend gives retailers everything they need to manage and grow their business. Founded in 2010, Vend has done away with the clunky old cash register, instead offering a mobile platform that lets you run the next generation of retail.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year

Nomination Title: Vend. Reinventing global customer service.

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

Every aspect of our business here at Vend is about customer success - it’s literally the focus of every employee in every department. Because without delighted customers, we wouldn’t have a business. But we don’t just focus on how our customers use Vend, we help customers succeed in business overall.

Total customer satisfaction is a huge goal for us. We’ve tackled this in every layer of the business, but there are three key strategies we’ve implemented:
We’ve set up offices in every major time zone in order to offer our customers 24/7 support. While incredibly difficult and expensive, it’s well worth it.

Offering more levels of support. Our customers vary greatly in their requirements. And especially now that Vend is more well known, and cloud technology is being eagerly welcomed, we are working with a wider range of customers.

- Some customers aren’t necessarily as tech savvy as those we’ve dealt with before, and require a lot more dedicated assistance. To help these customers succeed with Vend and in business we’ve established Vend+. This is a paid support offering in which we handle the customer’s setup from start to finish and train them and their staff, all done remotely.

- For the customers that require onsite support, we’re rapidly growing our network of resellers and implementation partners. We see these people as extensions of Vend, so provide them with extensive training and resources.

- And for those that are particularly short on time, in mid-February 2015 we implemented real-time chat support. It’s been a resounding success, with a 99% satisfaction rate already, and hundreds of customers using the new chat service. Better yet it has helped reduce the thousands of email tickets and calls we get each month and the engagement rate is at 40%, nearly double that of our other support methods.

Grow our customer success team. We have strict limits on how many customers our Retail Solutions Specialists, Customer Success Managers, and Account Managers can serve at any one time. This means our customers always have someone at Vend who is engaged and knows their business thoroughly. But it also means as our customers increase our team has to expand as well. Year on year we are tripling our customer-facing employee numbers, with a mere 12 in 2013 growing to 35 in 2014, before exploding to 106 this year. That’s nearly half of our entire staff across the world interacting with our customers every single day, delighting them at all times.

Knowing how we can better serve our customers is also very important to us. One way we monitor this is through quarterly Net Promoter surveys, which collect feedback and a rating from every user. We email them to every Vend user, and not just the account owner, so we get a true picture of how things are going, particularly from the people on the shop floor using Vend everyday. We use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and feedback to:

Identify gaps in our product offering and inform our development roadmap.
Help track overall customer feeling and set customer health scores.
Nurture happy customers into Vend evangelists.
Address the needs and concerns of unhappy customers to transform them into happy customers.

We’ve responded to this feedback by making important changes to the product and marketing of Vend, ultimately increasing our NPS by 60+ in three months - an exceptional result.

Our customer satisfaction also is evident by our industry-leading reviews and satisfaction scores, which are all completely transparent made public. In 2014 we had an average score of over 92%, and have achieved 100% on multiple occasions. Feel free to see how we are going today, and every day, here: http://www.vendhq.com/tour/support.

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

- Achieved an average customer satisfaction score of 92% throughout 2014
- Achieved a 100% customer satisfaction score on multiple occasions
- Implemented real-time chat, with hundreds using it since it’s inception in mid-February
- Achieved a 99% customer satisfaction score through chat support
- Increased our global Net Promoter Score by 60+ points
- Tripled our customer-facing staff numbers to over a hundred to ensure we delight our customers on a daily basis