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Company: FreshBooks, Toronto, ON, Canada
Company Description: FreshBooks is the #1 Cloud Accounting Specialist for small business owners that always aims to Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday. Based in Toronto and founded in 2003, our aim is to allow small business owners to save time on paperwork so they can spend that time on doing things they love with their family and friends.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: Executing Extraordinary Experiences Everyday

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2012 (up to 525 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:

At FreshBooks, we believe every single time a customer contacts us is an opportunity to create an extraordinary experience. Actually, that’s the mission statement our support team lives by: Execute extraordinary experiences, everyday.

This past year, the size of the FreshBooks’ Frontline Support Team nearly doubled from 10 to 18. The most difficult challenge in growing the team this quickly was making sure we were still consistently providing extraordinary support. To this end, we created 2013 service standard goals. These stats are now always projected onto a wall to provide constant motivation to the team.

Our 2013 stats so far:

- 103,875 calls and emails
- Average call pick up time: 1.4 rings (Try calling us! 1-866-303-6061)
- Average email response time: 58 minutes
- *Average customer satisfaction rating: 97.6% (7740 ratings)
* Customers can choose a happy face (10), neutral face (6), or sad face (1)

The biggest obstacle the Support team faced this year was providing support for one of FreshBooks' newest features: Automatic Bank Importing. To offer this feature, FreshBooks partnered with a third-party company can extract transactions from bank websites. This was the first time the Support team would need to provide support for a feature we didn’t have full back-end access to. We were afraid our customer satisfaction rating would decrease because we wouldn’t be able to investigate and resolve issues immediately.

Our solution was to create a Support/Product liaison role. The liaison would learn the inner workings of automatic bank importing, teach the team how it worked and how to support common issues, create a process to communicate issues to our partnering company and proactively create FAQs for our help site. A Support Rockstar took on the liaison role and as it turns out, was an amazing idea! The team was very organized and knowledgeable about how to support bank importing and the process of requesting additional help from our partnering company as needed. The liaison even started weekly phone calls with the partnering company to keep on top of priority customer issues. The result was customer satisfaction ratings for bank import issues are as extraordinary as all other interactions.

But the absolute most fulfilling achievement from the past year was having the each team member personally meet customers. Since empathy is critical to serving others well, we reached out to customers, set up visits at their workplaces and sent two volunteers to meet them. We believe this old-fashioned human interaction gives customers the opportunity to share their story with us and because our customers are entrepreneurs, each story is always inspiring. It also puts a face to those thousands of people we support by email and phone everyday. The visits not only deepen the connection the customer has with FreshBooks, but inspire the Support team because we’re able to see the difference our software and support makes in their lives.

This past year, the team has organized a total of 15 customer visits in Chicago, Ohio, Toronto, Austin, San Francisco and just this past April, one of our Support Rockstars organized a customer meet-up in Singapore while she was vacationing there!

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

Steve Bujouves is the senior manager of the support team here at FreshBooks. He is extremely passionate about providing extraordinary experiences for customers and also championing the positive and fun support team culture at the company. Steve’s known for being a strategic and innovative thinker—someone you can count on to be decisive and focused when making tough calls. Outside of work, Steve’s a bit of a movie-buff and a Toronto International Film Festival regular. He thrives on the city life and during the summer plays in not one, but two softball leagues.