Company: Lifesize, Austin, TX
Company Description: Lifesize is the only company to deliver video conferencing that’s as easy, as lifelike, and as remarkable as meeting in person. Founded in 2003 and acquired by Logitech in 2009, Lifesize continues to reinvent the video conferencing industry.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Lifesize's Customer Obsession Team

Tell the story about what this nominated team has achieved since January 1, 2014 year (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Over the past 9 months, Lifesize has undergone a significant transformation from a hardware-based, partner-focused organization to a dynamic SaaS cloud-based company where Customer Obsession is at the epicenter of everything we do. It’s such an interesting time for us. It’s like having a fast growing start-up embedded in a traditional slower moving organization. As part of this transformation, we needed to completely reinvent ourselves into a company who puts customers at the heart of everything we do and that moves at the pace of an early-stage start-up. The team was charged with changing its not so caring culture, where saying “no” was a common theme, to a culture where customer success and happiness are the only measures of true achievement. Formed around our customer obsession vision, the team has quickly created a family like experience for our customers by always putting customers first. In 9 months, the team has been restructured, refocused and rejuvenated and now the Lifesizers closest to our customers are empowered to make decisions that have positive impact. The new approach has resulted in a team of customer obsessed Lifesizers who provide amazing experiences for our customers as measured by a transactional Net Promoter Score that started at -4 in June of 2014 and is now consistently at 50% or more week over week. World-class support organizations reach a NPS of 75% or higher and the team is working hard week after week to reach world-class.

Change isn’t easy and transformation is even harder. The team has faced a very challenging 9 months. Not only have they learned a completely new set of technological skills, they have also completely reinvented how customers are served. This means helping to define what great service experiences look like, implementing new structures, processes and metrics to understand how we’re doing and ensuring the right tools and systems are in place to be successful. We started by throwing away all the old school call center metrics. The metrics were driving the wrong behavior and creating experiences that were not meaningful for customers. We set one number for the team to hit, a consistent 50% transactional NPS each and every week. The team was empowered to tell us what needed to be done to hit the 50% and ideas started flying. We then read through survey responses to see where the trouble spots were and interviewed customers to understand what we needed to do to improve. Our findings were overwhelming. There was a sentiment that the team wasn’t communicating effectively with customers and failing to set expectations on next steps. We also quickly realized that we didn’t have a good tool to understand ticket aging so we evaluated and procured a tool and defined the process for consistently. Without a tool, it was difficult to own the customer experience and set expectations up front if we weren’t able to hit our ultimate goal of a first response resolution. Customers also wanted a response from someone who understood their issue, not an automated message. Now, only skilled Tier 1 support engineers own our various channels.

Moving from an environment with a top down leadership approach to one of servant leadership and a culture of little change to one with high uncertainty and continuous change is taxing on a team and we couldn’t have gone through this transformation without the strength and support of each and every team member. Through it all, we have seen 0% attrition. Typically, people choose careers in customer service because they love customers and helping others, something we call “Service DNA”. Unleashing this is all it takes to be great … that and getting out of the way and supporting all the great ideas that start flowing once the team feels empowered. Trust and hope for creating something great is what now drives our team.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominated team since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

• Introduced 24x7x365 Extreme Support
• Introduced Net Promoter System to bring the voice of our customers closer to our business and drive continuous improvement based on feedback
• Redefined Lifesize standard on meaningful responses from days and weeks to 1 hour
• Reduced case backlog from over 2,000 cases weekly to 600
• Transformed a -4 transactional Net Promoter Score to 36% in the first 6 months
• Consistently hitting 50% or more weekly transactional NPS since January, 2015
• Re-energized sales team, happy customers allows them to focus on selling.

• Launched Lifesize Community, an online resource for customer collaboration, advocacy and industry insights. Within 3 weeks of launch, the Lifesize Community had more content and members then competitors’ communities had in a year and surpassed 1,000 new members within one month of launch