Blackbaud - Contact Center of the Year

Company: Blackbaud, Inc., Charleston, SC
Company Description: Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) is the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good. Serving the entire social good community—nonprofits, foundations, corporations, education institutions, healthcare institutions and individual change agents—Blackbaud connects and empowers organizations to increase their impact through software, services, expertise, and data intelligence.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center of the Year (Over 100 Seats) - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Blackbaud Customer Support

The Blackbaud B2B Support team is comprised of about 400 employees with offices across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Central America. In January 2017 we began a transformational effort to move to an industry standard model of level-based support as we integrated 10 disparate, single-product Support teams into a unified Center of Excellence (COE). As the COE matured throughout 2017 and 2018, we worked to revamp our onboarding and training methodology and migrate to modern, scalable systems. In 2019 the COE expanded further to integrate global Support teams that were at different states of maturity and often on non-standard systems, processes or KPIs. Due to the multi-year effort to standardize across the global Support teams, our team was in position to handle an otherwise challenging year in 2020.

Our teams serve the entire social good community, including nonprofits, foundations, corporations, education institutions, healthcare institutions, and individual change agents. In 2020, our customers were a critical part of the front-line response to the global pandemic. Blackbaud Support was proud to be their partner in success.

Outline the organization's achievements since the beginning of July 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words).

As a result of efforts to mature our call center, we were able to:

-Evacuate global headquarters in September 2019 for Hurricane Dorian without impacting customer experience. We maintaineda<3:00 minuteASA,whilehandling 96% of normal volume.

-Implement global 24/7 support for mission-critical issues and standardize common systems to enable volume sharing. Leveraging global teams, we responded to 90 additional mission-critical contacts that previously waited until business hours for resolution.

-Respond to an immediate “stay-at-home” order in March, to stand up our mobile workforce overnight. During the first week working remotely ASA was 0:38, a 1:36 improvement year-over-year. Through the end of May ASA remained at 1:03, a :16 improvement year-over-year. Along with a quick response, we provided excellent customer service as evidenced by our 96.23% CSAT including all satisfied responses.

-Publish Covid-19 resources in partnership with internal teams to help customers adapt. In November 2020, we launched a new community platform to enhance the customer experience. This mobile-friendly platform allows customers to access resources and interact with peers whenever and however they’re working. Community membership has grown 22.5% since July 2019 to 96,571 users in November 2020.

-Develop a seasonal calendar of events to drive 1: many adoption programs, in partnership with our Customer Success team, targeting seasonal volume spikes. As a result we conducted 35+ sessions with over 2,600 attendees on seasonal topics that can drive volume as high as 57% over average.

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 organization's past performance (up to 250 words).

Rather than shutting down in the pandemic, our customers faced their own challenges as they responded to global events and Blackbaud Support was there to meet their needs. Our team became hyper-focused on enabling customers to continue their missions during this crisis. Inbound volume was statistically flat in 2020 year-over-year. Despite this, we saw a 7.9% improvement in ASA. We are partnering with our customers to get them back to their mission faster. (Attachment1)

Customers have taken note of our efforts. CSAT rose to the highest point of 2020 in May, 4.7% higher than the close of 2019. (Attachment2) Customer feedback includes comments about our patience, positivity and professionalism during these trying times. (Attachment3)

Lessons learned from the hurricane evacuation allowed us to quickly pivot to an extended WFH situation in March. Having previously confirmed teams were equipped to work remotely and having established communication channels allowed us to maintain productivity during this period. We’ve maintained employee engagement while working remotely with flexibility in addressing each employee’s personal circumstance individually as they deal with their own challenges. By leveraging global support teams, we’re able to address mission critical issues for our customers outside of standard business hours by pulling in support from another time zone. This prevents us from increasing the burden on our on-call resources who are also coping with their own unique circumstances due to Covid-19.

Between January – June 2020 we experienced a 1.59% increase in volume over 2019. During this time we saw a decrease of our average speed to answer from 1m 56s in 2019 to 1m 47s in 2020, a 7.9% improvement.