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Company: Salesforce, San Francisco, CA
Entry Submitted By: Hill and Knowlton Strategies
Company Description: Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing leader. Our social and mobile cloud technologies—including our flagship sales and CRM applications—help companies connect with customers, partners, and employees in entirely new ways. And thanks to the cloud, all of it comes with low cost, low risk, and fast results. Our 100,000+ successful customers tell the story best.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Use of Technology in Customer Service

Nomination Title: Nextdoor - The Social 'Nextdoor' Neighbor

Tell the story about how technology has improved your customer service initiatives since the beginning of July 2012 (up to 525 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:

There is a growing debate over whether social media is actually making us all less social in our day-to-day lives. Nextdoor, the private social network for neighborhoods, is reversing that trend by creating a social network that connects neighbors in the real world as well as online, encouraging, in the words of the "Nextdoor Manifesto, "online chats that lead to clothesline chats." This new approach to social networking is striking a chord with people across the country. Nextdoor is now being used by more than 20,000 neighborhoods across all fifty states, with memberships increasing more than 400% over the last year.

Launched in 2011, Nextdoor is the only neighborhood social network that allows users to quickly spread the word of a break-in, organize neighborhood watch groups, locate a good local contractor, get help finding a lost pet, introduce themselves to a new neighbor, plan a block party, and more. Each neighborhood creates its own private website on Nextdoor, and each member must verify their address before joining to confirm that they really are a neighbor.

Nextdoor’s support staff, known internally as the Neighborhood Operations Team, plays a crucial role in the company's success, ensuring that members have a useful, safe and enjoyable experience. In November 2012, the team decided to partner with Desk.com to power Nextdoor’s support systems, which has been critical to the team’s success in scaling with Nextdoor’s explosive growth.

The Neighborhood Operations Team has leveraged Desk.com’s capabilities in a number of ways:

-They replaced their previous, static FAQ page with a Help Center powered by Desk.com's searchable knowledge base, which immediately led to a 25% drop in cases as users were better able to answer their own questions without contacting support.

-They have used Desk.com's APIs to integrate Nextdoor's user data into the support queue, enabling the team to prioritize contacts from Nextdoor Leads and Top Inviters, keeping response times to these critical users under 24 hours even when there was a backlog in the overall queue.

-The easy visibility Desk.com provides into the entire case history (and keys statistics) of users who make contact, enables the Neighborhood Operations Team to offer higher quality support to these users.

-By leveraging Desk.com's analytics systems, the team was able to better identify both product issues and inefficiencies in the team's support tools and systems. Addressing these shortcomings led to a further 30% drop in the contact rate and a 50% drop in average case handling time.

-Desk.com's mobile templates have enabled the team to effectively support the launch of Nextdoor's iOS and Android apps.

Responding quickly and effectively to user concerns is critical to Nextdoor's success, as the company uses technology to bring neighborhoods together and to foster neighbor-to-neighbor communications. Without Desk.com, it would not have been possible for the Neighborhood Operations team to support a user base that has tripled in ten months since Nextdoor adopted the additional platform tools.

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated customer service organization:

Nirav Tolia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nextdoor, the free and private social network for neighborhoods.

Nirav began his entrepreneurial pursuits as an early employee at Yahoo! before co-founding and serving as CEO of Epinions, a website devoted to user-generated product reviews. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com, and Nirav was COO before the company went public on Nasdaq and was subsequently acquired by eBay.

Nextdoor was founded in 2010 and is actively used in thousands of neighborhoods across the U.S. Under Nirav's leadership, Nextdoor has raised $40.2 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Allen & Company, Google Ventures, and others.

Nirav grew up in Odessa, Texas and graduated from Stanford University.