BiggerPockets - Customer Service Leader of the Year

Company: BiggerPockets
Company Description: BiggerPockets is a complete resource for anyone looking to succeed in real estate investing. We offer free content, tools, and a community of over 1,500,000 members to help people avoid mistakes; learn valuable tips; find partners, deals, and financing; and make the best investing decisions possible.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Leader of the Year

Nomination Title: Hilary Catton

Hilary has led the Customer Service team for BiggerPockets for over seven years. Each year she brings a new perspective to the way we can build a better experience for our customers, as well as ensuring her team feels accomplished and continue to grow in their roles. She is someone who actively keeps her curiosity developing by reading books and going to conferences to build her credibility for implementing new processes for efficiency. Her mindset is always to be proactive in fixing issues vs. being reactive. She looks to make positive changes to create the best customer experience before most of us know it needs to be addressed. She is a hard worker and makes sure to emphatically help each department in our company succeed in their goals by sharing data her team collects on our customers to cohesively build the best experience our customers could have. Her performance is undoubtedly to help employees around her, create a safe and fun environment for her team, and produce an encounter that every customer remembers and wants to share with everyone they know. She is the type of leader that any company would be honored and thrilled to have on their team.

It's been a few tough years for everyone with COVID running rampant throughout the world - but Hilary made sure she transformed the interactions our customer service team had with our customers to bring some light to each customer that connected with us. To revamp our customer experience, Hilary updated all the ways we interact with our customers by bringing in empathy, understanding, patience, and graciousness. She wrote up new briefings for her team to learn how to productively speak and connect with each customer on a personal level. She also recognized that just changing the language our customer service team uses wouldn’t be enough, so she also pitched and executed a discount program for customers who couldn’t pay for their memberships due to falling on hard times. By introducing this new approach, it gave our members the confidence to trust that we hold a high bar of integrity for our customers. It also saved BiggerPockets revenue by having customers choose to stay instead of leave after their engagement with her team. On top of that, the metrics of her team stayed consistent and even got better in certain aspects. Her team has persistently kept an average 20 minute response time, 5 hour resolution time, and an 86 NPS score. She cares so much about her team that she made sure to do everything in her power to keep her team employed during this time and due to changes she made, we were able to keep all her team members.

The achievements Hilary made were significant to building a better reputation with our customers and creating a better brand. Watching her be so empathic to our customers, was very rewarding for us to watch as the connections we made with our customers got stronger. During a time when most people were looking out for themselves professionally, which was natural, she put her team, the company, and our customers first. She wanted herself and her team to illuminate the day of anyone who came in contact with them, and it worked. We have had so many great responses and feedback to the changes she made, that kept our customers coming back. The metrics Hilary pushes herself and her team to accomplish surpass the expectations we have of her, and of the industry. Other companies we have researched have an average resolution time of 7-23 hours, and Hilary keeps her team under 20 minutes. Their resolution times average 3 days, ours average 5 hours. Hilary’s team CSAT averages 96%, whereas our industry average is 80%. And lastly, our NPS average is 85 vs. 30-50. Whenever she sees these metrics sliding, she will investigate why and how to immediately make changes to get back on track. She then will train her team on how to adjust and modify the way they interact with our customers. Hilary takes pride in always pushing herself and continuing to better her performance within the company and department.

The attachments are:

- Hilary's monthly metrics

- Her NPS vs others in the industry

- Her resolutiontimes vs.others in the industry

- Her response times vs.others in the industry

- Positive feedback from our members