Company: Squarespace, New York, NY
Company Description: Based in New York City, Squarespace is a beautiful and intuitive website publishing platform that allows anyone to easily create professional blogs, pages, stores, and galleries without touching a line of code. The completely inclusive, all-in-one service provides content management, hosting, domains, social integrations, e-commerce, and 24-hour customer support.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year

Nomination Title: Customer Care that's Fast and Personal

Tell the story about what this nominated organization/department achieved since January 1 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:

Since 2004, Squarespace has offered a fully-hosted environment for creating and maintaining a website. Known for its sophisticated yet easy-to-use interfaces, Squarespace's do-it-yourself tools allow creative professionals, businesses, bloggers, and web developers to quickly and easily create and maintain professional, high-quality websites. In July 2012, Squarespace announced a new, modern website publishing platform called Squarespace 6 that doubled the weekly support ticket volume from 7,000 to over 14,000.

The Customer Care team also handles 1,000 to 1,600 live chats a week, and answers all help queries on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Accordingly, the team grew from 18 to 37 members in 2012; there are 53 employees in the Customer Care team at present. Customer care is one of the most important parts of our business, as Squarespace is a company that prides itselfs on excellent customer service and experience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With the higher support request volume, it was critical to ensure that the team was growing ahead of the customer demand, while keeping the quality of customer support consistent across the board. In order to sustainably grow the heart and soul of the business – a group of individuals that interfaces directly with customers – an extraordinary level of attention and detail was placed upon recruiting and training.

Squarespace devised a new, weeklong training program that helps introduce staff to other departments within the company, give them a taste of the company culture, and educate them about current and past versions of the platform. Squarespace also believes in empowering the Customer Care staff to make their own decisions and determine the projects they work on. Team members are not on the outside looking in, but maintain close relationships with designers and engineers that make updates and additions to the platform. Both practices proved successful as Squarespace’s Customer Care team maintains the highest retention rate out of all departments. Squarespace's challenges during Hurricane Sandy was a testament to the company's dedication to customer service.

During Sandy, the company's data center in downtown Manhattan was so severely impacted by Hurricane Sandy that it suffered a total loss of power despite multiple levels of redundant systems. At the time, there was no resolution in sight. Backup fuel reserves and building infrastructure had been destroyed by Sandy's storm surge, which flooded many buildings downtown. Of course, this was a historic and unprecedented storm for the entire tri-state region, bringing about the largest storm-related power outage in Con Edison’s history. Squarespace employees helped keep the servers going by hand-carrying fuel up 17 flights of stairs in pitch darkness.

Throughout the event, Squarespace customers experienced absolutely no downtime related to the power outage. The proof is in the pudding: Squarespace’s Customer Care team scored, and continues to score, an average of 90% in satisfaction ratings with e-mail support tickets. The live chat team, first started as an experiment in early 2012, grew to 6 team members and scored an average of 95-98% in satisfaction ratings. The data is culled from a customer survey system that allows us to collect over 700 responses from customers a week.

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

Christa Collins is the Director of Customer Care for Squarespace. She was the third employee of Squarespace and has been with the company for over six years. Christa started out as the only customer support contact for Squarespace, and now manages a team of over 40 customer care staff based in New York. Previously, Christa worked in retail management and legal administration in Southern California. She loves sewing, is addicted to coffee, and reads everything she can get her hands on. Christa resides in New Jersey with her husband, four daughters, two dogs, two turtles, a fish, and a guinea pig.