Clubspeed - Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation

Company: Clubspeed, Irvine, CA
Company Description: Clubspeed offers an industry-leading all-in-one technology solution for connecting hotels, tour operators, and guests to local family entertainment centers. Their venue management software seamlessly integrates customized online booking with automated marketing tools, a powerful AI-driven POS, gamification, and revenue-driving membership plans. We serve over 500 customers in 46 countries.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Clubspeed Customer Success Team

Clubspeed’s customer success team is the heart of our operation. With 500 clients in 46 countries, and a complex, multi-function software product that we customize to the changing needs of each facility, the customer success team serves as both our public face and an integral part of our service model.

But our clients are family entertainment centers, offering close-quarters physical activities like laser tag, go-karting, rope courses, jungle gyms, and birthday parties. The Covid-19 pandemic hit them hard. As a result, we were forced to make some hard employment decisions to keep our heads above water. There was no way to keep everyone, and the loss in customer success effectiveness meant that we entered 2021 with a backlog of 300 unresolved tickets, a downward trend in productivity, and a need to make real, immediate changes.Our recovery strategy was composed of three parts: hiring and rebuilding our team, devoting time to training to allow our employees to excel in every way possible, and investing in automation and process changes.

Built new training pipeline. To deepen individual expertise on the most complex customer service tasks, we developed a new 12-month onboarding process that successfully credentialed every customer service representative as a Level 2 Support rep, a full Customer Success Manager, or a member of one of our advanced onboarding teams.

Played to our strengths. We incorporated a science-based strengths assessment into our office culture. Employees meet weekly in 3-5 person pods to coordinate and allocate tasks according to each person’s intellectual, analytical, social, and emotional areas of excellence.

Kept our finger on the team’s pulse. We empowered team members by adopting Friday Pulse, a survey and predictive analytics tool that tracks happiness, lets employees give each other shoutouts, and elicits both targeted feedback and open-ended input.

Made time for mentorship. We implemented a program allocating part of everyone’s day to mentorship: Level 3 Support staff mentored Level 2, and so on down to the newest hires, keeping knowledge transfer smooth and professional growth consistent.

Supported self-learning. We developed a rich digital knowledge bank for our processes and tech, along with a guided self-teaching tool for new employees.

Leveraged automation. We built new scripting and automation tools to find new ways to solve customers’ most common problems.

Guaranteed value. We created a new process document to guide responses to downed sites. Its precise stepwise procedure guarantees that every escalation is bringing in new expertise to attempt new solutions—minimizing both downtime and customer frustration.

Clubspeed offers an industry-leading all-in-one technology solution for connecting hotels, tour operators, and guests to local family entertainment centers. Their venue management software seamlessly integrates customized online booking with automated marketing tools, a powerful AI-driven POS, gamification, and revenue-driving membership plans. They serve 500 client locations in 46 countries, processing more than $1 billion in annual transactions for over 20 million guests.

Investing in exceptional work has paid off tremendously. Clubspeed has done more than recover: our company is more efficient, organized, energetic, and successful than it has ever been before.

When we ask our clients why using Clubspeed makes a difference for their businesses, “Customer Support” is their first or second answer every single time. The automated system is doing its part here, having already reduced customer downtime by an average of 15% per customer and close to 250 hours in total while saving 200+ human working hours every month. Those improvements are reflected in the feedback numbers, too, with our customer satisfaction moving from 73% in 2019 to 94% in 2021.

Internally, the news is just as good. Efficiency and output are up, with SLAs improved by 55% to more than 20% above the industry average. Thanks to a 270% increase in the number of tickets closed every week, we cleared our 300-ticket backlog in seven months of hard work. The Friday Pulse surveys have tracked a steady upward trend in sentiment and satisfaction, with employee happiness up by more than 15 points since we implemented our new programs. And our previous retention rate of 60% has improved to an exceptional 95%.

It would be an understatement to say that everyone at Clubspeed is proud of the Customer Success team. They faced their most significant challenge ever in 2020, and came through it ready to build the best customer success team any of us have ever seen.

We designed a comprehensive recovery strategy with three core components. First, we brought our team back up to full strength by hiring at 35% above market rates, attracting only the best and the brightest. Internal salaries rose to match, increasing by up to 35%, in a bid to retain top talent. Our second recovery project was a set of training and culture initiatives to let every team member develop and leverage their unique strengths. Finally, we invested in automation and process changes to make every hour of employee work count for more. Our rapidly growing team did an extraordinary job planning, developing, implementing, and then adapting to every component of the initiative.

Attached is company overview with public customer comments on the company and the impact we have had on them.

Attached is detailed information on how support and customer success processes.