FreshBooks
Company: FreshBooks, Toronto, ON, Canada
Company Description: FreshBooks is the #1 Cloud Accounting Specialist for Small Business Owners that always aims to Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday. Based in Toronto and founded in 2003, our aim is to allow small business owners to save time on paperwork so they can spend that time on doing things they love with their family and friends.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year
Nomination Title: FreshBooks: Executing on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday (aka The Secret Sauce)
Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 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:
Going above and beyond is the norm, not the exception for the FreshBooks support team. Organizing customer meet-ups and visiting customers at their workplace allows the team to better understand challenges small businesses face every day. These insights allow us to build the team on empathy.
Customer meet-ups (where we organize events for our users to come talk to us) are events that we have been doing for years but we made it part of our company culture this year. We have on average done at least one meet-up per month, in various cities and countries visiting one man shops to large companies with multiple staff members. The team also attends conferences like WordCamp and Startup Weekend to learn more about our customers and share our knowledge on customer service/running a small business.
The second achievement for the support team this year was better recording of our customer’s feedback on their support experience by using a survey style used by other tech companies. In previous years, we knew we delivered great support but we did not have a way of tracking that metric effectively. Based on what we have seen from companies similar to us (Shopify, 37 Signals), the industry norm for good customer service is high 80s/low 90s out of 100. Our average since July is 97.8% with close to 2,000 responses on the survey attached to every ticket sent to the FreshBooks support team. Knowing that we are delivering great customer service is a effective benchmark for us to have but it also provides immediate reinforcement for the Support Rockstar (which we did not have previously)
We also pride ourselves on providing great phone support and our goal is to always respond to calls within two rings. We beat our goal this year with an average of 1.5 rings, unheard of in any industry. When you call FreshBooks, you are never put on hold and you never have to navigate archaic phone systems to get appropriate help. Simply give us a call at 1-866-303-6061 to experience it for yourself! The great thing is that we are scaling this great phone support when our load has been increasing month over month, just surpassing 5 million users this year.
Our goal of becoming a proactive support team was also a key component to our success this year. Most good support teams are reactive to their customers and help them with their problems. We believe that great support teams are ones that are proactive, which involves celebrating milestones with customers by sending them a cake for sending over 100,000 invoices. The result of us being proactive has been amazing and you just have to search Twitter to see a customer talking about how we surprised them with a gift or even a call to celebrate a milestone with them. We are also proactive towards helping other tech companies, like WordPress and Soundcloud, by sharing how we deliver great customer support and the importance of making customer service part of their company culture.
Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:
The leaders of the support team each play an important role in our reputation of great customer service. Grace, the first member of the team and current manager, is really the heart of the team. She ensures that the team members are happy and positive. Current FreshBooks traditions, like sending gifts to customers, started with Grace.
Randy is the soul of the FreshBooks support team and developed our great culture. He organizes customer meetups so that the front-line team can see some of our customers in person to ensure that we know exactly what their needs are.