Bottomline Technologies - Contact Center of the Year

Company: Bottomline Technologies, Portsmouth, NH
Company Description: Bottomline Technologies (NASDAQ: EPAY) helps businesses pay and get paid. More than 10,000 businesses and banks benefit from and rely on Bottomline for domestic and international payments, effective cash management tools, automated workflows for payment processing and bill review and state-of-the-art fraud detection, behavioral analytics and regulatory compliance.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center of the Year (Up to 100 Seats) - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Bottomline’s ongoing journey to achieve Customer delight

Bottomline, a leading provider of financial technology, helps thousands of organizations around the world make complex business payments simple, smart, and secure. Customers rely on us for global payments, cash management, bill review, fraud detection, behavioral analytics and compliance solutions.

From July 1, 2018 – June 30, 2019, our Support team achieved a combined Customer Delight Score of 94% from 2,937 surveys. Our goal for Net Promoter Score is 50 and we survey four business lines. This survey told a different story scoring only a 5 from 762 responses. Analyzing key NPS drivers, we recognized several issues: Support used disparate case workflows—negatively impacting customer experience; our support portal lacked functionality and information to enable faster resolution and, we weren’t actioning feedback or analyzing case reasons consistently to improve product and engagement processes. Despite living core values working with and for each other to delight customers, we knew we’d not be successful without conquering these challenges.

In the last year and a half, Bottomline launched a concerted effort to improve people, process and technology systemic issues, with the goal of significantly improving Customer experience and delight. The effort has yielded great results and we continue to innovate to further improve.

Outline the team's achievements since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):

We implemented:

A Knowledge Centered Service approach, empowering team members to continuously create and revise articles for use by Customers and us. We embraced KCS coaches—several team members are now certified. Customers increasingly self-service, accessing information through our portal. Less time is spent ramping new support staff, and the team is highly efficient in managing our knowledge content.

Then, a formal change management process, where Support leadership is the gate to releasing code to production. This has significantly reduced defects and customer issues while improving system availability. Simultaneously, we implemented more alerting to correct issues before Customers experience them. And monthly Product Review meetings highlight trends in product issues and Support recommendations for prioritization of resolutions.

We invested:

Upgrading our Customer Care Portal to modernize the UI and enable personalization. Customers can now access system performance dashboards, knowledge content and streamlined case logging prompting suggested resolutions based on customer descriptions of issues.

Standardizing case handling workflow across all support geographies, including standard metrics and cohesive use of Salesforce. We now have better operating-hour support coverage and provide better career growth opportunities.

Listening better, driven by a new team leading our Customer listening program called “Delivering on Our Promise”. This team established more robust surveying capability and analytics, closed loop feedback processes, and an advocacy program built on Customer storytelling, not archaic endorsement harvesting. Over the next six months, we’ll expand our use of Qualtrics to provide more robust and actionable analysis for our teams across Bottomline.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the team's past performance (up to 250 words):

With these changes in place, results have shown a massive improvement in our customers' experiences and the feedback provided. In the last 6 months, our customers have given us a Customer Delight score of 95% from 1,465 surveys and an NPS of 29, up 24 points from the previous year.

Anyone that has shifted a Support Organization to KCS understands that it’s no small undertaking. Leveraging global working sessions, continual communication, and training, KCS has generated 1,708 new articles since go-live.

Taking an organization with multiple Support teams using different ways to log cases, consolidating into a single standardized way of using it and upgrading an online portal at the same time is no easy task either.

We have new lines of communication open with Product to ensure Support is involved before, during, and after a release, are part of the approval process, and are regular contributors to the future of our products based on customer feedback. We’ve seen results on system uptime go from 99.730 in Q4 of last year to 99.965 in this past quarter and items such as password resets that in 2018 were over 7,000 a month have reduced to around 1,000 based on product changes which were informed by customer feedback.

We take delighting our customers seriously at Bottomline, letting them, and our fantastic employees, guide us to heightened levels of “World Class” support. We know that if we’re not delighting customers with every interaction, someone else surley will.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):

Please see the included PPT that provides the following information:
Slide 2: Survey Metrics from Salesforce from July 1st, 2018 – June 30th 2019
Slide 3: Survey Metrics from Salesforce from July 1st, 2020 to January 6th 2021
Slide 4: NPS Metrics from Delighted.com from July 1st 2018 – June 30th 2019
Slide 5: NPS Metrics from Delighted.com from January 1st 2020 – January 6th 2021
Slide 6 & 7: Knowledge Centered Service
Slide 8: Change Management Process
Slide 9: Product Review Meetings
Slide 10: Password Reset Volume Reduction
Slide 11: Customer Care Portal Upgrade
Slide 12: Case Redesign
Slide 13: Voice of the Customer Team