Company: Bandwidth Inc., Raleigh NC
Company Description: Bandwidth (NASDAQ: BAND) is a global cloud communications leader delivering exceptional experiences through voice, texting and emergency services. Our network, which covers 65+ countries and 90+ percent of global GDP, is trusted by hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Zoom, as well as global enterprises. Our award-winning support teams help businesses solve complex challenges every day.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Customer Service - Telecommunications Industries
 Nomination Title: Bandwidth Inc.
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2022, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
N/A
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 150 words used.
Let’s face it, the last 1-2 years have been challenging for Customer Success teams across all industries. According to ChurnZero, who runs what they claim to be ‘the largest comprehensive study in the CS field,’ 11% of CS ops roles were lost in 2024. Help is not on the way, either, at least in a human form: while 63% of companies reported growing/hiring CS roles in 2022, that was down to 43% in 2024.
In this macroenvironment, global cloud communications provider Bandwidth saw an opportunity to extend our lead in support. While others cut, we actually added headcount, bringing on new capabilities with our own team of technical, AI, and automation-minded engineers, uniquely embedded within Customer Success. This dedicated ninja team enables us to leverage automation and AI to grow our Support capacity and enable our ever-so-valuable human support representatives to do more meaningful, impactful work with our customers.
- Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2022 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 228 words used.
Phone calls are mission-critical communications for our customers, so excellent technical support is essential for this service. Bandwidth is known for our legendary human-based 24/7/365 support. But our humans were spending a lot of time doing basic, repetitive initial research when requests came in. Looking up call records and account information across systems took an average of 10 minutes just to get started.
Now, after building in automation and AI to the workflow, a summary of useful information is presented automatically to the agent after our customer submits the case. Instantly, our agent sees 24 hours of call records, industry/market data, and account information. The result? We can immediately start to diagnose the customer issue. This has saved an average of over 180 hours per month, which is over a month of work for one support person!
We didn’t stop there. When agents need to seek information on a phone number (which is up to 2,000 times per week), they need to search one of many databases in a very complex telecommunications ecosystem. Often, this required guesswork.
Our team built a unifying search tool that saves roughly 4 minutes per search, which is over 100 hours per month saved!
These time savings are immediately passed onto our customers, in faster responses and time to resolution. And our human agents are freed up to solve higher level challenges.
- Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 245 words used.
Most companies put Customer Success in a silo. As the Customer Success teams identify technology opportunities and needs, a business case is brought to a separate Technology team to analyze and build a solution. It’s often a slow process and there are almost always competing priorities.
We broke this paradigm at Bandwidth. We created our own dedicated team of technologists and developers, embedded in our Customer Success team, who are experts on understanding and improving our workflows. Certainly, we still have projects that are large enough to require help from the larger development and engineering teams, but we have been able to take so much more into our own hands, move faster, and manage our own destiny.
This approach also embodies Bandwidth’s culture–which is to operate like a nimble software provider rather than an old-school legacy phone carrier. This approach is our secret sauce; it’s embedded in our entrepreneurial spirit and has allowed us to compete successfully with the larger, more established, legacy players in our space.
While growing our business by over 20% (year over year, see Bandwidth 3Q24 release) in this challenging headcount environment, we maintained support KPIs that were among the highest of our telecom and CPaaS peers:
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CSAT (Jan 1 2024 - Aug 1 2024): 97.6% (measured via transactional survey in each support ticket)
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Response SLA On-Time Performance (Jan 1 2024 - Aug 1 2024): 98.3%
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4.6/5 Capterra rating
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G2 Leader in CPaaS Platforms for 26 consecutive quarters
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 36 words used.
Examples:
1. Screenshot of new Bandwidth automated call records data embedded in support ticket
2. Screenshot of new phone number lookup tool for Bandwidth-owned numbers
3. Screenshot of new phone number lookup tool across industry databases
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