Company: Box, Inc., Los Altos, CA
Company Description: Founded in 2005, Box provides a secure, scalable content-sharing platform for over 27 million users, and 225,000 businesses, including 99% of the Fortune 500. Box's dynamic, flexible content management solution lets users access and share content from anywhere, on any device – while providing IT visibility into how content moves within their organizations and beyond.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Box Submission - Customer Service Team of the Year

Tell the story about what this nominated team 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:

Stevie Video: https://cloud.box.com/s/akzh6ude3k4hq28tmfd6r9lrztzjninj

The past year has been one of amazing growth and accomplishments for Box as a whole:

• We filed our S1 with the SEC last Spring
• We’ve grown revenue 110% year-over-year
• We are now at 1100+ employees worldwide

…and for our User Services team in particular:

• We completed a rebranding effort
• We opened a new office in Austin, TX
• We saw customer satisfaction rise significantly
• We re-architected our Career Path plan and execution for college-hire agents
• We implemented an “Agent of the Year” award (voted on by their peers)
• We re-aligned all performance metrics to focus entirely on User Satisfaction

We intrinsically believe how we work directly with our users is a true strategic advantage. This focus, for example, resulted in rebranding our team from “Technical Support” to “Users Services” to more accurately reflect our commitment to serving our users.

Over the past year we’ve worked aggressively to ensure quality service to our users is always top-of-mind. We rolled out new training and processes centered on “case ownership” which allowed us to achieve our goal of nearly 90% of cases being resolved by a single agent. This empowerment of first level agents to own each “case” from start to finish - rather than viewing them as a transactional “tickets” - had a real impact. Specifically, our customer satisfaction numbers grew significantly from 88.1% entering the year to 95.8% toward the end of it.

While “ownership philosophy” was key, coverage was also a significant focus this year. Specifically, to meet the needs of our customers who are increasingly global, we added new team members at our headquarters in Northern California, doubled our team in London and hired our first agents in Tokyo Japan. However, the most strategic coverage initiative for the User Services team was building out, opening and staffing a new office in Austin, TX.

Austin expansion proved more challenging than initially anticipated. Box went from being a well-known brand name in Silicon Valley to a complete unknown in Austin. This posed numerous challenges for us from recruiting, training to mentoring. (Not to mention the logistical, IT and real estate challenges). To combat some of these issues, each new hire spends their first three weeks in HQ to train, make introductions and better understand our collaborative culture. We initiated weekly “Austin Process Sessions” and mandated leads complete remote-worker management training. We also had two of our top performers relocate to Austin to help build the team while embracing a career growth opportunity.

This theme of career opportunity & mobility was the single most significant focus of the year. In our ongoing efforts to ensure the incredible talent we hire are continually challenged, we established a program called “Sweet 16”. The goal: after 16 months at Box you should be in a new role. This approach is intended to maximize employee engagement as well as leverage the wealth of product and user knowledge within other parts of the organization.

Not surprising to anyone involved in a Customer Service organization, one of the common challenges is maintaining team morale. Regularly working with stressed, confused and frustrated users can certainly be draining. To address these concerns as well as share our knowledge globally, we provided top performers the chance to travel to international offices to train/work with other agents. We also engaged with Box’s non-profit division (Box.org) and several of our team members traveled to South Africa to participate in an effort to set up a computer lab at a township school. We also implemented a spot bonus program – based on User Survey results - and continued a peer-awarded “Agent of the Year”. It may interest you to know last year’s Agent-of-the-Year winner was rewarded with an all-expense paid trip to the 2014 Stevie Awards dinner he graciously received our Gold Stevie.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to be considered for this tremendous honor.

Watch Stevie Video: https://cloud.box.com/s/akzh6ude3k4hq28tmfd6r9lrztzjninj

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.)