Company: Central Desktop, Pasadena, CA
Company Description: Central Desktop helps people work together in ways they never imagined possible. Our SocialBridge collaboration platform connects people and information in the cloud, making it possible to share files, combine knowledge, inspire ideas, manage projects and more. Central Desktop serves half a million users worldwide. Key Central Desktop customers include CBS, MLB.com, Citibank and Sesame Street.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Central Desktop Customer Experience Team

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2012 year (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:

2012. Whew! What a year. I think the entire team wanted/needed a vacation from everything that happened. There really wasn’t a single part of our Services strategy and platform that wasn’t tweaked, overhauled, modified, or thrown out and started anew. The benefit of a smaller team like ours means we get to preserve the main thing we think makes us stand out against much larger folks in our space; that is our people. Personally, as the head of the team, I can say with scouts honor, with a clear conscience, that I have never worked for a team more devoted, more passionate, and more authentic in their drive to make our customers raving fans. But since you and I have never met, I thought I would back up my comments with very real results. The numbers are what they are. But it was the likes of Susan, Caitlin, Katie, Elizabeth, Kevin, Habib, Trung, Millie, Jessica, Jared, Kenny, Alex and more that made it all come true. I’m very proud. Far more important than my own sense of selfish pride – our customers were elated. Check it out!

How we did:

• Achieved an average of 94% customer satisfaction, compared to 85% in the industry average (source: ZenDesk ticketing software)
• 40 average Net Promoter Score as compared to 28 in the industry average (source: Satmetrix)
• 99% average monthly customer retention rate
• Less than 1 hour average response time to all support tickets

• Over 2,220 customer surveys submitted, how did our customers rank us? (10 highest)
o Professionalism: 9.4
o Courtesy: 9.5
o Timeliness: 9.3
o Technical Knowledge: 9.2

How we did it: Here is our heavy-lifting short list of accomplishments – with just a team of 11. (Please see attachments for more details)

• Rolled out third leg of Customer Experience team – “Customer Success Team”. This team carries the Customer Experience torch forward by building substantive, nurturing relationships with our customers after they deploy our products.
• Hosted 2nd Annual User Conference, “Collabosphere”, expanding audience by 100%.
• Overhauled New Customer implementation platform, “FlightReady”, resulting in 54% higher levels of client engagement and 24% improvement in initial user adoption within 1st 30 days
• Launched new Help Center based entirely on customer feedback resulting in 27% increase in traffic
• Partnered with over 300 enterprise customers, tackling highly complex customer deployments like IBM, Adobe and PGA Tour – all of which gave us 10 out of 10’s on our surveys
• Rolled out Good Data advanced analytics to better measure team performance and customer satisfaction
• Certified entire support team on new technologies like ADFS/Single Sign on and APIs

We humbly submit the Central Desktop Customer Experience team for the 2013 Stevie Award for the Best Customer Service team. Thank you.

Upload a collection of supporting files and web addresses to our server to provide more background information to the judges. You may upload any number of attachments and URLs through the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above. (Do NOT list your URLs below.)

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

Mark Fordham
VP Services and Singing Cockroach
See here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9I6DIjU1_0&list=UUQdPYl-J9x0wmqUrTQ_TrEw&index=18

2010-Present
VP Services at Central Desktop

Head coach over an extraordinary team of support, implementation and customer success professionals

Suffers occasional insomnia while seeking out ways to make customers even happier

Architect of a complete overhaul to Central Desktop's approach to the Customer Experience; including the introduction of advanced technologies, complete pivot to a truly customer-centric business model, development and roll-out of adoption-focused strategies and processes, and a metric-focused service team

Complete collaboration junkie who believes an open work environment and team empowerment and development can change the world

2008-2010
Director, Software Implementations at NEOGOV

2006-2008
Sr. Director at Advantage Sales and Marketing