SnapEngage - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: SnapEngage, Boulder,CO
Company Description: SnapEngage is an industry leader for live chat software. SnapEngage was born out of the 2008 TechStars program in Boulder, CO founded by Jerome Breche and Jerome Mouton. We have grown steadily as a completely customer-funded company, and today have become a leading live chat software provider, installed on over 10,000 websites worldwide.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software - Up to 100 Employees

Nomination Title: SnapEngage

The customer service team at SnapEngage offers much more than standard support. We are chat experts so that our clients don’t have to be. Our team is ready to solve problems. We deliver guidance, tailored solutions, and customizability that is unmatched in the industry.

Our customer team functions as partners to our clients. Partners as in, we have an equal stake. Why? The #1 churn reason from software solutions is lack of usage and understanding. That’s why we think of the customer journey holistically. A client who has a good relationship with us is more likely to be an early product adopter, expand chat and automation into other departments, and have a longer lifetime. We provide conversational technology strategy guidance that help clients achieve real ROI and scale.

Our customer service team is a proud 2-time Gold Stevie, a 2019 and 2018 G2 Crowd Leader, and a 2020 key player in the global live chat software market by The Market Feed. We are headquarted in Boulder, Colorado with an office in Berlin, Germany. All team members have been remote since early 2020. We've had flexible remote scheduling since 2010, making us more prepared for the shift to fully remote.

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

Chatbot & customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) - Went from a 95% average CSAT score in early 2020, to a 93% average in the summer of 2020.

Tracking this score enabled us to realize that the new chatbot we had added on our website homepage was not being received well by current clients who needed help - it actually created an extra step. We removed that step in our flow and our average instantly rebounded back to 95% for the next 4 months.

COVID-19 & CSAT - Since July, just like other companies, the SnapEngage support team was hit by the delayed effects of the global pandemic. We had team members having to take time for personal and family reasons at an unusual high rate and the result of this was a dipping CSAT score again, averaging 93% during this time. What we learned during this time was that the only way to support our customers at the expectation level previously set would be to add more resources to address potential future absences in a pandemic environment.

We are also experimenting with our own automation capabilities. We strongly believe in “drinking our own champagne”, that is, using our own product to its highest capabilities. Our automation continues to improve and be more efficient and user-friendly than ever before. In order to best serve our customers and partners, we strive to use the latest and greatest technology to demonstrate ROI firsthand.

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 department's past performance (up to 250 words):

Live chat and chatbots are becoming less of a standalone product and more of an add-on to existing product suites. For instance, Salesforce recently bought Slack and Zendesk started as a help desk platform and now they offer live chat.

While all-in-one solutions can be helpful in streamlining a tech stack, the best solutions are the ones that hyper-focus and obsess over one product line. The fastest mile run by a decathlete (4: 14.48 by Ashton Eaton) is much slower than the fastest mile by a dedicated mile runner (3.43.13 by Hicham El Guerrouj). We follow this same approach.

Our solution has the unique ability to horizontally, rather than vertically, integrate across an organization. We mean that SnapEngage can improve business operations and deliver premium insights to multiple functional groups that other solutions cannot. An all-in-one solution may require different onboarding and implementation for each new product; for instance, chat may be separate from a CRM and the two may not play well together, chatbots are an additional add-on and can be extremely expensive.

With SnapEngage, we focus on our customers’ customers. Our team delivers premium client experiences so that our clients are prepared to do the same for their clients.

A horizontal integration allows our clients to scale with their demand and find the right balance of people and automation without breaking the bank. We deliver insights that help our clients realize growth potentials and focus areas.

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 attachments for screenshots of our analytics from 2020. Our customer and technical support team answered over 12,400 chat conversations. This does not encompass tickets that are created through email or escalatations, only live conversations.

For these 12,400+ conversations we averaged a 9 second response time. According to a study by SuperOffice, the average customer service response time is 2 minutes, meaning we are at the extreme low end of this average.https: //www.superoffice.com/blog/live-chat-statistics/

SnapEngage client, Nextiva, has seen 200% year-over-year growth of chat volume with a 24.3% rate of chat conversations that lead to sales quotes.https: //snapengage.com/speed-to-contact-is-everything/

SnapEngage partner, VoiceNation, mentions our competitive pricing. "I realized how overpriced Drift was and the lack of support we were getting for the product. When I saw what SnapEngage could do, it was a no brainer for us to switch to what I view as an equivalent service for a fraction of the cost."