Cvent - Contact Center of the Year

Company: Cvent Inc, McLean, VA
Company Description: Cvent is the global meeting, event, travel, and hospitality technology leader. Cvent offers software solutions to event planners for online event registration, venue selection, event management, mobile apps for events, e-mail marketing and web surveys. Cvent provides hoteliers with an integrated platform, enabling properties to increase group business demand.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center of the Year (Over 100 Seats) - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Cvent Client Services 

Tell the story about what this nominated contact center 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: REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

Cvent is a technology company, providing software solutions to event planners and venues. However, our customers primarily know us for our world-class service. Our Executive team says, “We don’t sell the product, we sell the service.” Our customer-centricity and focus on Mythic Service defines us.

At Cvent, our Client Services business unit is divided into three front-line, Service Delivery teams: Customer Support (reactive/transactional), Client Success (proactive/strategic), and Professional Services (fee-based.) We deploy all three teams to empower our B2B clients to achieve their goals for meetings and events.

The Customer Support team is our reactive/transactional branch of Client Services. Our customers are often cited as having one of the five most stressful jobs. They can sometimes call us on the worst day of their lives: for example, it is check-in day at their annual conference, and one of the badge printers is not working, causing long lines. The speed at which their issues are resolved can have a real impact on their careers.

Our culture of Mythic Service was created to acknowledge this truth and delight our customers. The phone queue is our primary channel because we want every customer interaction to be high-touch and happen in real time. Our 298 courteous and highly-trained Product Consultants create an atmosphere of trust and ease over the phone, which is critical to our mission.

At Cvent, our secret sauce is our employee investment. Our Product Consultants receive 18 weeks of training and mentoring, including a mentoring sign-off process, before flying solo with customers on the phone. The mentoring phase is comprised of a 1-on-1 pairing with the most productive employees, representing an additional investment of time and resources. Cvent University is taught by top Management to reinforce our company’s culture, vision,and mission.

Continuous improvement is provided by our ICMI Award-winning Quality Assurance team. Coaching is conducted on both recorded and live calls, and scores are tallied in forms integrated into our CRM technology, Salesforce. The coaching session provides immediate feedback to the Product Consultants, empowering them to modify their behaviors and provide the best possible customer experience with each new phone interaction.

New in 2018 is our Escalation Desk, poised to take ownership of any customer case that is proving too challenging to be resolved quickly by our Product Consultants. The Escalation Desk is a small team comprised of our most well-trained, skilled staff in Customer Support. They are passionate advocates who do not rest until the case is resolved for their customers. They are relationship-builders with other business units at Cvent, including Technology, Product Management, and Sales. They stay glued to their customers' cases until the problem is fixed, avoiding the pitfall of transferring callers between different Support teams partitioned by product. They are trained to recognize integration touchpoints between our different software solutions. And when a software defect is discovered that cannot be fixed quickly, they work consultatively with their customer to design and implement an alternative approach until the customer is delighted.

Because the quality of the customer experience is valued so highly at Cvent, customer satisfaction is the most important measure of success in the Customer Support team. At Cvent we are proud of our 2018 transactional survey scores, with a 93.43% overall satisfaction rating from 21,126 responses. For all less-than-satisfied responses, a root cause analysis is conducted, and the Service Delivery Manager calls the customer directly. We also measure Customer Effort to ensure a painless experience while getting issues resolved. Over the past 18 months, customers agreed or strongly agreed that their service experience was effortless 92.59% of the time.

Client quotes this past year included these:

• "Your professionalism, kindness, and patience with us has been fantastic, and your customer service is unsurpassed."

"Our attendee experience was our number one concern this year, and with your help we knocked their socks off."