AWeber - Contact Center of the Year

Company: AWeber, Chalfont, PA
Company Description: For more than 20 years, AWeber has been a market leader helping over one million entrepreneurs and small businesses accelerate their growth through powerfully-simple email marketing tools and expertise. Along with its award-winning 24/7 US-based customer support, AWeber delivers customers the ability to quickly load & manage contacts, send amazing emails, and analyze results.
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: AWeber Customer Solutions - The Gold Standard for Support

The AWeber Customer Solutions team has a long-standing history of excellence, dating back to the company’s founding in 1998. A cornerstone of AWeber’s business from the beginning, Customer Solutions continues to grow and evolve to align with customer needs and product feature updates.

In 1998, the Customer Solutions team was one person. Now, the Customer Solutions team is staffed with 30 team members committed to excellence — and we’re growing. The Customer Solutions team has always evolved along with customer needs, which includes growing the team to meet demand, introducing around-the-clock service, and most recently, adjusting to become a fully remote team and serving an increased number of customers with the introduction of AWeber’s new free tier.

However, the team’s commitment to helping customers live their dreams and connect with their audiences in remarkable ways has never wavered.

While we’re always looking ahead, we can’t help but be proud of our Customer Solutions team’s past accomplishments. We have a strong history of Customer Solution team success, having been recognized by the Stevie Awards each year since 2016. We’ve also received recognition from the National Customer Service Association.

As evidenced in our KPIs in our supporting materials, Customer Solutions continues to improve year over year as they refine their best in class status when it comes to support. The team has improved in every measurable area YoY.

In our first full year as a remote team, we’ve further refined our communication, processes, and services to meet our evolving needs - ensuring we meet those of our customers. We’ve scaled out our Migrations team, and refined processes to allow for prospects to seamlessly transition from their existing platforms and quickly get started with AWeber.

We’ve fully integrated Customer Solutions into each of our product teams. Team members serve as the voice of the customer and inform product decisions at all phases of development. They attend all virtual meetings, provide input, and help shape our product. This year, their influence can be seen across multiple major product releases including our new Account Reporting, improvements to our Landing Page Generator, Newsletter Hub, and more.

Additionally, the Team owns communication around service outages, performance bugs, and platform improvements. We make sure our developers are aware within moments issues present themselves. This flow of communication fortifies our accessibility and minimizes downtime for our customers.

This level of integration extends to our Engineering team as well. We’ve continued to invest in our ‘CEECS’ program which gives engineers an opportunity to see intimately how customers use our product and allows them to use their unique perspectives to engineer solutions in real time.

The significance of integrating Customer Solutions fully with both the Product and Engineering departments cannot be overstated. The cross-functional exposure has deepened the teams’ skillset, engagement, and impact - all of which is evidenced by our unparalleled KPI results. We’ve seen reduced downtime, reduced full resolution time, and increased customer satisfaction. Fully integrating with our Marketing department was the logical next step.

Each member of AWeber’s Customer Solutions team is fully invested in forging genuine partnerships with the real folks who use our platform. We look for every opportunity to educate and enhance our customer’s results. One way that we do this is by becoming storytellers - CS has partnered with Marketing to actively showcase customer successes and provide ‘swipeable playbooks’ for others to emulate. By showcasing exactly how real people solve problems using AWeber, the team provides value that greatly exceeds that of our competitors.

Additionally, many of our direct competitors in the email marketing industry limit free users’ access to Customer Solutions. AWeber is proud to make our full suite of services available to every customer and prospect in need of expert assistance. We don’t limit our phone support, chat support, migration services, or email support, regardless of customer status.

We believe it’s more important now than ever to provide assistance to small businesses. At a time when small businesses are facing unforeseen challenges, AWeber’s Customer Solutions team is doing its part to help.

The document attached highlights AWeber's Customer Solutions' key performance indicators since July 2020. We highlight overall performance, including ticket volume across all channels — email, chat, and phone — overall satisfaction, and speed of service.

We believe in providing the best support for all customers, including those on our free tier. Unlike nearly all of our competitors - we are available to prospects and customers alike - 24 hours a day.

The hundreds of thousands of users on our platform are real people. They are small business owners, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, and creators. Each of them deserves to connect with real people committed to serving as partners solving problems, and ultimately helping them achieve success. We are those partners. We are proud to serve them. This is why we are the best in class and more than deserving of gold. Thank you so much for your consideration.