SignUpGenius - Front-Line Customer Service Professional of the Year
Company: SignUpGenius, Charlotte, NC
Company Description: SignUpGenius CEO Dan Rutledge founded the company in 2008 after a series of planning snafus, including a potluck mishap where everyone showed up with only chips and salsa and diet Coke. Since then, the company has evolved to help people coordinate all types of groups, from sports tournament volunteers to employee training at Fortune 500 companies.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Professional of the Year - Technology Industries
Nomination Title: Teresa Clark: Stellar Leader of a Scrappy Team
Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (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: REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION
Teresa Clark leads the customer service team at SignUpGenius, the top online sign up site for event and volunteer management. Teresa and her team work to provide a phenomenal user experience for up to 18 million unique users each month, embodying the company’s mission to empower people to change the world by making it simple to organize groups.
Teresa’s ability to leverage and scale a scrappy team of five customer support analysts to serve a large customer base has led to impressive results:
- From October 2017 to October 2018, Teresa led the team in responding to 113,424 questions from users. The number of support tickets increased only 3.5% from 2016-2017, despite site traffic growth of 14%. Teresa led a comprehensive update of the site’s help page in 2018, steadying the number of tickets in light of site growth. With the goal to give users self-help support at their fingertips, Teresa played a key role in creating all new FAQs on topics from creating a potluck sign up to editing slot quantities.
- Support team analysts were successful in resolving the customer’s issue in the first response 81.79% of the time from October 2017 to October 2018. Year over year, the success rate of the first response resolution increased by 2.4%.
- Even with a smaller support team than the previous year, the average time to resolve support tickets decreased 88% in 2017-2018 as compared to the previous year.
The customer service team supports people who organize groups such as youth sports teams, schools, nonprofits and large companies.
Teresa often goes beyond the call of duty. She has called customers from home on the weekends when they have time-sensitive needs, advocated to give emergency volunteers free access to premium subscriptions and even created complex sign ups for some people, so they could spend less time organizing events and more time serving others.
SignUpGenius has released a number of new features since July 1, 2017, including a new online payments tool. To prepare for the new payment system launch, Teresa worked with the third-party payments software and developed in-depth training for the support team so they could assist users effectively. Along with resolving questions about the new payment tool, the support team helped users navigate new features such as increased password security and new paid subscription levels in 2017 and 2018. She also oversees the process for resolving advanced technical issues – serving as a liaison between the testing and development teams and the user.
Kelly Johnson, SignUpGenius support analyst, shared, “Teresa goes above and beyond for every user who contacts SignUpGenius for support. She always provides thorough, thoughtful responses to ensure questions are answered in a timely manner on the first interaction. It is important to her to give all users the information they need so they can get back to organizing and volunteering, making a difference in their community.”
Teresa’s leadership of the scrappy SignUpGenius support team helped the company significantly increase revenue in 2017, and unique users reached 77 million. In October 2018, SignUpGenius reached its highest web traffic ever with more than 18 million monthly visitors. Under Teresa’s leadership, SignUpGenius received a Gold award for Front-line Customer Service Team of the Year – Technology Industries at the2018 Stevie Awards.