Gleim Exam Review - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: Gleim Exam Review, Gainesville, FL
Company Description: Gleim Exam Prep creates online self-study courses for accounting certification exams like the CPA, CMA and EA. A family-owned and operated business for over 45 years, our mission has been to maximize knowledge transfer while minimizing our customers’ time, frustration, and cost. We help people succeed in their careers and pride ourselves on supporting them from start to finish.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year

Nomination Title: Gleim Exam Prep: Customer Service Department of the Year

Gleim Exam Prep creates online self-study courses for accounting certification exams like the CPA, CMA and EA. For 45+ years, our mission has been to maximize knowledge transfer while minimizing our customers’ time, frustration, and cost. The company was built on our commitment to customers, and we pride ourselves on supporting them from start to finish. Every step in the candidate journey, from purchase to passing the exam, is designed to enhance the customer experience. Accounting certifications are generally pursued by candidates who already work full-time or have other personal or professional commitments. They are busy people looking to take the next step in their careers. While our customers are perfectly capable of studying on their own, we believe they deserve more individualized support, which is reflected in both our product features and level of customer service. Helping our customers is embedded into our process at every level—from Personal Counselors, who go beyond traditional customer service and create a personalized study plan to support each candidate, to our Access Until You Pass® guarantee, which allows access to our course with no additional fee until the exam is passed. We’ve instituted customer support practices like these to empower a broader audience to pursue certification and build a better future for themselves.

In January 2019, we implemented new customer service practices and metrics to increase and better measure customer satisfaction. While we’ve always received positive feedback, this data illuminated the value we add to our customers such as: (1) exceptional responsiveness, (2) high-touch personal service, and (3) innovative solutions during the pandemic.

Every call into Gleim is handled by a person, and we are staffed to eliminate call queues. While most e-commerce websites make it difficult to contact an individual, we encourage customers to reach out to us with questions. The national standard is answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds. The Gleim team has answered 92% of all calls within 15 seconds and 98% within 30 seconds since January 2019. Our average hold time is under 7 seconds. Additionally, in August of 2019, we started a chat feature to allow customers to contact us immediately on our website. We have handled approximately 13,000 chat sessions, about 850 per month, with a satisfaction rating of 4.89/5.

The onset of the pandemic in early 2020 changed the way many businesses operated, including our own. Despite major operational changes, such as the transition to remote work and the closing of examination centers, we continued to provide exceptional support to our customers. We proactively reached out to them with extra online resources and face masks to use at testing centers. We increased our virtual meeting options to help isolated customers feel more connected. We also ramped up our production of webinars, hosting over 48 hours for thousands of attendees from 17 countries on topics ranging from study tips and exam changes to technical content.

After the pandemic began, we grewour Personal Counselor staff and heightened their coaching and mentoring efforts by increasing outreach to customers with study tips, encouragement, and simply checking in. When our team sees signs of trouble, like a customer not logging in for 30 days, we identify possible issues and get them back on track in a supportive way that fits their preferred communication style and needs. Candidates can customize their level of interaction with us; they can opt to receive calls, emails, or text messages in any combination and decide how often they hear from us.

As we’ve expanded our customer service initiatives, the feedback we’ve received has been incredible. The Gleim motto is “onward and upward,” and every company decision is measured in how it will affect our customers’ success.Our customers’ stories inspire us; because of them, we are constantly looking at new ways to improve their experience and help them achieve their goals.

-99% satisfaction rating for course and overall customer service.
-97% satisfaction rating of Personal Counselors.
-Accounting experts answered 20,000+ course content inquiries with 3.56/4 satisfaction rating.
-Helped customers via phone, answering 92% of calls within 15 seconds and 98% within 30 seconds with an average hold time of under 7 seconds.
-Created live webchat (4.89/5 satisfaction rating) with average response time of under 20 seconds.
-Shipped orders with 99.9% accuracy with same day shipment 98% of the time.
-Distributed thousands of masksand created text alerts for test center closures to become the go-to authority on testing changes during the pandemic.
-Created Facebook CPA Study Groups, gaining 1,200+ members in 3 months.
-Provided 48+ hours of new webinars post-pandemic to 6,300 attendees, reaching 17 countries.
-Produced 69 introductory videos for NSBCPA to promote inclusion and representation in accounting.