Company: Chronus Corporation, Seattle, WA
Company Description: Chronus empowers mentoring, coaching, and continuous learning initiatives by combining cloud-based software and program best practices to provide a complete talent development solution. Chronus’ talent development solutions, including Chronus Mentor, Chronus Coach, and Chronus Learn, are used by more than 500,000 professionals worldwide at leading institutions.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Chronus Corporation Customer Success Team

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 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:

Chronus empowers mentoring, coaching, and continuous learning initiatives by combining cloud-based software and program best practices to provide a complete talent development solution. We operate on eight core values, the first of which is “Customer Focus”. The Customer Support team at Chronus leads this charge, ensuring that clients start with an unbeatable onboarding experience and are consistently WOWed by Chronus’ commitment to continuous improvement.

Chronus is a start-up organization, and we expect our small team to rise to big challenges. In order to accomplish our mission and WOW our customers, the 5-person Customer Success team focuses on four major areas: optimizing the customer onboarding process, developing training resources, managing customer issues efficiently and effectively, and polishing our product based on customer feedback.

CUSTOMER ONBOARDING AND TRAINING RESOURCES

Starting the customer experience off right is key to developing a long, happy vendor relationship. We first focus on building a strong understanding of our customers’ needs and goals. Then we ensure that the customer onboards quickly, has a solution tailored to their needs, and knows how to manage the program. From strategic best practice guides to help shape the direction of a program, to admin and end-user videos, job aids, and Q&A forums, we provide support in a variety of formats to guide our customers from implementation through program close.

• 30 new clients onboarded with a 2-person Program Management team since July 2013
• Developed a “Quickstart” onboarding process to reduce implementation time by 60% and increase customer satisfaction with the program
• Use our own software to train administrators while onboarding, reducing required training time
• Videos, job-aids, best practice guides, and monthly forums support our users both On Demand and at key times during their lifecycle

CUSTOMER ISSUE MANAGEMENT

Resolving customer issues means having a smart process to quickly prioritize issues, meet SLAs, and maintain effective communication across teams. With a global support team, the Customer Success and Engineering teams triage daily on customer issue tickets, and use the Agile methodology to ensure effective prioritization and ticket resolution.

• 99.3% customer satisfaction score over the past 12 months
• Ticket close time reduced by 70% after process revamp

Customer satisfaction response rate up from <5% to 40% after process revamp, with no reduction in satisfaction scores.

BUSINESS IMPACT REVIEWS

Along with developing a well-tailored program for end-users, we also work with our customers to determine if the program is having the intended business impact. Early in the implementation stage, we discuss the goals of the organization in implementing our software, and compare these goals to actual results in a Quarterly Business Review.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

As a start-up organization, Chronus has many opportunities for improvement, growth, and refinement of our product. We are striving to gather more feedback from our customers to better align our product to their needs, and provide data that will help customers run their programs effectively.

• Customer Success works with clients to identify opportunities to expand successful programs, leading clients to increase the number of tracks or upgrade their subscription.
• Major software improvements including new features and improvements on existing features were made based on customer feedback.
• NPS Survey implemented in the last 3 months shows an NPS score of 57 with a response rate of 52%.

By focusing on an effective onboarding process, timely ticket management, and a culture of continuous feedback and improvement, the Chronus Customer Success team is able to deliver exceptional customer service to our clients. We will continue to enhance our processes, solicit feedback from our clients, and aim to delight our customers every step of the way.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)