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kCura

How to EnterCompany: kCura, Chicago, IL
Company Description: kCura are the developers of the e-discovery software Relativity, a web-based platform for the processing, review, analysis, and production of electronic data. Relativity has more than 70,000 active users worldwide from organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice and 95 of the top 100 law firms in the United States.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Awards Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software

Nomination Title: kCura

Tell the story about what this nominated department 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:

kCura strives to be effective communicators, and this core value permeates our client services department. It begins with providing the most effective documentation and trainings available, and making it consumable. All of our technical documentation is publicly available on our website. Our online customer portal is a self-service support resource where users can open requests with our client services team, view reports of historical issues, access a repository of knowledge base articles, and make suggestions for product enhancements. Additionally, with every release of our software, we provide users with release notes, updated documentation, and videos explaining the updates.

In summer 2011, we began providing live support with kCura team members in our Chicago office 24/6, alongside 24/7 emergency and on-call support. This means even our overseas clients have live support and web-based training during their working hours.

We also send out customer surveys to find out how we did whenever we solve a technical problem, and our marketing team conducts weekly satisfaction surveys that ask about support. We directly use the results to improve.

To provide our customers with a more personalized experience, client services recently began delivering account-based “pod” support. Our clients now have access to a designated team of support technicians whenever issues arise. It allows members of our team to develop relationships with our customers and understand their Relativity instance deeply. In fact, our clients have enjoyed working with their pod so much, they’ve suggested a “meet your pod” session at our annual user conference.

We recently created an infrastructure team in client services that is devoted to helping our users install Relativity, as well as scale and monitor the health of their environments. This group functions as the doctor of Relativity—checking in and remedying any issues in the software before they become a larger problem.

Because our government clients only allow access to their Relativity environment on site, we have a rotation of two team members in Washington, D.C. designated to supporting them. Our government clients submit a request, and help can be at their door in minutes. This service is unique in our industry, and we’ve found that the SLAs of our onsite support are comparable to our Chicago-based support.

This past year, we integrated our product specialists group—advice@kCura—into client services. This group focuses on finding unique ways to work with our software—developing workflows and building applications—to meet the individual needs of our partners. We’ve also integrated our education and training team and placed them in client services.

Since January 2012, our user count has increased 35 percent and our open request count has increased 37 percent. Even with a large increase in request volume, we’ve maintained 97 percent positive request surveys and met 99 percent SLAs.

“We evaluated a select few hosting platforms for document review,” said Andy Jimenez, President & CEO Evolve Discovery, a Relativity hosting partner. “Relativity’s outstanding technology was the reason for its consideration, but it was kCura’s stellar customer service that led us to choose Relativity…Excellent technology—even better people.”

 

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated customer service organization:

George Orr joined kCura in 2007 as vice president of client services. Prior to kCura, George was the messaging systems manager for Rotary International, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization specializing in humanitarian funding programs. From 2000 to 2004, he served as the lead network architect for Applied Graphics Technologies, a leader in content management, digital, and broadcast media distribution services. George graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999. He has extensive Microsoft and infrastructure training, and is certified in both arenas.