Mailchimp - e-Commerce Customer Service Award

Company: Mailchimp, Atlanta, GA
Company Description: Mailchimp is an all-in-one Marketing Platform for small business. We empower millions of customers around the world to start and grow their businesses with our smart marketing technology, award-winning support, and inspiring content. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Atlanta with additional offices in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Vancouver, Mailchimp is 100% founder-owned and highly profitable.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: e-Commerce Customer Service Award - Computer Industries

Nomination Title: Empowering Our Customers During Times of Uncertainty

Since 2001, Mailchimp’s founders, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius have empowered small businesses by democratizing marketing software, especially email marketing. Dan provided customer support in the early days, answering customer questions by email himself.

Twelve years later, Mailchimp began to experience hypergrowth. Support requests exploded. Dan stepped away from the queue to help manage the company’s growth, entrusting Support leaders to scale support. And they did. Support expanded our Knowledge Base to improve self service, introduced a scalable training program, and launched 24/5 support.

In 2019, eighteen years after Dan sent Mailchimp’s first support email and six years after hypergrowth began, Mailchimp had grown into an all-in-one marketing platform. We’ve scaled our customer support offerings so we’re available to educate and empower small businesses as they grow. We now provide:

-A robust collection of guides, tutorials, and webinars
-24/7 email
-A new AI chatbot
-24/5 live chat support
-Outbound phone support for Premium tier customers
-A Customer Success team
-A Business Development team.

In 2020 with the pandemic threatening small businesses, Mailchimp Support was the heart and soul of Malchimp’s efforts to empower the underdogs.

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

Mailchimp’s support team is always dedicated to our customers. But when COVID-19 hit in early2020, our customers needed us more than ever. We rose to the occasion and adapted quickly.

As public spaces shut down, small businesses needed to get online fast. So we accelerated our plan to offer domains to customers, moving a previously planned promotion up by a month to get free domains to customers. From April 8 to May 31, we offered domains with no renewal fees for five years, enabling customers to start operating online quickly at no cost. Our support team was on hand to walk customers through the process of getting their businesses online.

And despite the challenges of 2020, we still delivered world-class support:
-Helping nearly 550,000 customers through queue-facing support, including:
510,683 users in Tech Support, with a 90.4% average Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) rating
Expanding AI supportbot availability, answering 60k+ customer questions without human intervention
Educating 51,960 customers worldwide via webinars

We also supported 300 releases, and provided customer insights to Product teams and leadership to continue to improve users’ experiences. And we increased revenue and improved retention:
Our Business Development team closed $6 million in new, annual recurring revenue, a 300% increase from 2019.
Our Customer Success team increased customer engagement to 34% from 20% last year, protecting roughly $42 million in annual recurring revenue.
The Customer Solutions Team engaged with over 1,600 customers and retained nearly 32% of those customers at risk of churning.

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

Our COVID relief offers and Free Domain promo were our biggest company-wide, cross-functional efforts of the year and were unlike anything our competitors offered.

We were able to provide a vital tool to small businesses who moved their businesses online for the first time, and Customer Support was vital to the promo’s success. By the end of the Summer:

We trained and prepared for the release five weeks early, including collaboration between Product teams and our Support Insights Analyst, Technical Training, and Technical Content teams.

Customer Success (CS) Team worked with businesses like Lolli and Pops to change their entire business model, as they’ve re-invented themselves to serve the changes COVID-19 brought to their business. They prevented significant loss in revenue for our customers and Mailchimp. Lolli and Pops said:

“Mall traffic has been impacted, so e-commerce really helped us out this year. Our revenue far surpassed what we've done in previous years, and that's mainly because of email. It's our main revenue driver.”

Compliance team reviewed over 5,000 accounts to prevent abuse of the Free Domain promo.

Billing team collaborated with our Revenue team to help execute promos that offered relief to small businesses and those customers who are working in the public health space.

Technical Content team published a COVID-specific pathfinder article that received 15,951 total page views and provided a 97.2% self serve rate.

Billing team successfully managed a 45% increase in ticket volume in Q2.