Company: GoodData, San Francisco, CA
Entry Submitted By: FleishmanHillard
Company Description: GoodData is the leader in end-to-end cloud analytics, enabling over 40,000 companies to store, combine, analyze and visualize data to quickly answer business-critical questions. GoodData’s mission is to help companies become all data enterprises: organizations that gain a competitive advantage by leveraging all data through advanced analytics.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Awards Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software - 100 or More Employees

Nomination Title: GoodData

Tell the story about what this nominated department achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 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:

Customer needs are built into GoodData’s DNA. From being the only cloud-based, end-to-end data analytics platform with security and time to value at its core, to predictive insights that help data projects succeed, GoodData is obsessed with its customers. In fact, it’s the company’s #1 value. Individual deployments of GoodData’s platform ensure that every customer gets a custom solution designed to help them meet specific business objectives and a real, live representative to be their trusted partner from installation to successes. But we haven’t even gotten on the phone yet.

Because it’s not perceived as a moneymaking department, customer support is often overlooked by businesses. In contrast, GoodData recognizes customer service as a key differentiator. Agents are encouraged to interact with customers authentically—there are no scripts and the decision to do what’s right rests in the hands of the team. The personality and thoughtfulness the team puts into each interaction has sustained a customer satisfaction rating of 98 percent for the past year.

Maintaining this high rating has given the team notoriety in the business. GoodData’s support team was featured as a leader in customer engagement in Zendesk’s Q3/2013 Customer Benchmark report regarding customer satisfaction, consistently leading the industry satisfaction average by more than 10 percent quarter over quarter. The team’s accomplishments led the company to be invited to speak as a thought leader at the Art of Customer Satisfaction conference in 2014, focusing on the crucial metrics needed to run a successful support team.

To ensure engagement and give customers value in the product, customer service representatives must themselves be GoodData power users. The team influences customer adoption by actively using the platform to measure and benchmark individual businesses. This research gives them actionable, valuable use case ideas they can pass along to customers. Senior members often sharpen their skills by contributing to projects on other customer-facing teams and new hires on board by pairing up with an experienced agent to collaborate on a project together. Constructing a project from data files to polished dashboards prepares agents for the challenges of helping customers encountering the same questions and struggles.

Documenting and consistently training on this key knowledge has allowed the team to polish every step of a customer interaction. From experience and training, agents are able to recognize questions and recommend solutions quicker. This has led the team to decrease their first reply time for ticket submissions (the highest volume of interactions) by over 50 percent compared to last year, an average that is almost 16 times faster than the 21-hour industry average.

Below are excerpts from completed service ticket feedback from the past year:

“I've been a heavy user of your support team over the last week or so and I just wanted to say how excellent the experience has been. It's amazing how much more you trust a system and a vendor when there is a high quality team there to back it up.” - Michael Wood, Receipt Bank

“I've worked in the support industry for a number of years and we all know what good support looks like. It's being a partner and really making your customer feel like they're heard and ensuring they're educated/updated as much as possible. I wanted to send you this email to recognize these great efforts as feedback like this isn't always shared.” - Ben Tan, Zendesk

“Our customer support efforts are an area I am scrutinizing (and candidly, where we need to see a lot of growth). I have to tell you that I think your support team is top-notch. I'm wondering if you might be willing to put me in touch with your head of customer support; I'd love to pick his/her brain.” - Cassie Young, Sailthru

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