Constant Contact - Front-Line Customer Service Professional of the Year

Company: Constant Contact, Waltham, MA
Company Description: Constant Contact, a leader in email marketing for 20+ years, offers an easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses create professional campaigns that can help increase customers and revenue. From advanced automation features to industry-leading integrations, to personalized coaching, Constant Contact is the trusted marketing partner of hundreds of thousands of growth-minded small businesses.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Professional of the Year - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: Barbara Frye, Customer Service

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (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:

Constant Contact's Barbara Frye has made impressive, measurable gains in how Constant Contact approaches and manages customer feedback, a critical component of how we conduct business. In October of 2017, Barbaraassumed responsibility of Constant Contact's Close the Feedback Loop (CTFL), which was previously handled by several employees as a partial responsibility of their overall job. CTFL is our post-survey follow-up process which oversees customer responses to 7+ customer surveys presentedvia email or in-product throughout the customer lifecycle. This process identifies customers, based on their survey responses, who may be unsatisfied or have valuable feedback to share so we can connect with them and demonstrate we care about their experience. Customers who rate Constant Contact a 0-8 on an NPS question or provide comments with 200+ characters are reviewed for an outbound attempt via phone or email. Our goal is to help these customers with their issues or knowledge gaps and overall influence positive change in their NPS rating of Constant Contact. Since taking over CTFL, Barbara has:

• Created new processes via system changes, across the different surveys, to streamline documentation and data availability
• Produced new process documents
• Communicated monthly results via extensive reporting
• Trained a colleague on processes for contingency coverage
• Expanded outreach efforts from NPS "Detractor" scoring customers only to now include "Passive" scoring customers
• Surfaced oversights that when fixed would greatly influence the customer experience
• Implemented post-connect CTFL Survey to understand if CTFL efforts are impacting NPS scores
• Adopted Team Lead Survey follow-up processes and reporting into her CTFL responsibilities

Constant Contact now reaches out to 96% of all customers who give us detractor and passive NPS scores. Prior to this, we were reaching out to an average of 61% who gave us detractor scores only; 12,000+ outreach attempts in 2018: 2,700 outbound phone calls; 9,500 outbound emails; 1,200 total connects.

For agents to submit tracking on known customer issues, known opportunities to improve usability, or to track feature requests, they trackto the Salesforce case which then our Voice of the Customer or Product teams can report on when considering future improvements In 2018, Barbara single-handedly completed 4,299 defecttracks, our highest count for customer-facing agents and more than double the next agent (1,836).

Barbara surfaced oversights that when fixed, greatly influenced the customer experience (e.g. a new feature was rolled into the product that was not communicated/trained to Support agents or included in internal/external help articles. This was immediately resolved by including it in next Release training and alerting with Knowledge Base team so they could work with Product for appropriate documentation).

NEW ADD for 2019 implemented mid-December 2018: Barbara implemented a survey that is emailed out 7 days after she connects with a customer about their feedback. The survey reminds the customer how they rated Constant Contact on their NPS question and asks them to rate us again since working with Barbara. Very early results (3 weeks and during the holiday period) but as of now she has:

• 53 connects
• 15 surveys completed
• strong 28% take rate (we average 10% for Tier 1 support surveys we send via email immediately following an interaction)
• average NPS improvement of 0.8 points on all survey responses, which is making a difference in moving customers from detractors to passives: Pre-connect NPS score: 6.8 Post-connect NPS score: 7.6

Barbara also streamlined processes for Team Lead efforts to followup on negative survey comments specific to agents. System changes provided improved consistencyby requiring documentation of all contacts and efforts to connect with customers. Team Leads are now transferring customer follow-ups to her when feedback is more product-focused, even if they may have scored well on NPS. She also implemented new reporting of cumulative and individual Team Lead efforts, which never existed, to identify trends and to hold leadership accountable for their customer follow-ups.