Carbonite CustomerCare - Customer Service Department of the Year

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2019, Click to Enter The 2020 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service

Company: Carbonite (an Opentext Company) Boston MA
Company Division/Group: Carbonite CustomerCare
Company Description: Carbonite provides a complete Data Protection Platform for businesses and the IT professionals who serve them. From backup and disaster recovery to data migration, high availability and endpoint protection, our flexible solutions can be tailored to meet the data protection needs of any business.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software - 100 or More Employees

Nomination Title: Carbonite (an Opentext Company)

Carbonite’s Mid-Market support team consists of highly skilled agents who provide 24/7 support for our small/med business product suite world-wide. This Mid-Market support team has been built by integrating two support centers which were acquired over the past several years. Both teams worked independently, had many gaps in alignment, were underperforming in many areas including meeting our On-Time service level. The On-Time metric is the percent of email transactions processed within the targeted cycle times (response time). Our current goal is 95% of emails are responded to within the targeted cycle time based on severity. Our historical performance on this KPI has been in the 80% range for the last several years, far below our goals.

There were many challenges preventing us from meeting this goal. Lack of agent coverage on nights and weekends, inadequate processes and technology, lack of visibility, and no oversight prevented our organization from achieving this goal.

This goal was the last KPI for the support team to overcome in 2020, for all other KPIs had been achieved. With a clear plan in place to improve performance for KPI the Mid-Market support team delivered outstanding results for this important On-Time KPI.

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

The team launched the deep-dive efforts to improve the On-time metric in February 2020 and drove the changes needed through continuous improvement efforts. Over the course of several months we identified significant opportunities and made changes to our CRM, reporting, processes, and employee behaviors to drive positive results. The team drove the effort to achieve On-Time into the following core steps, which enabled them to methodically march towards achieving our goal

Investigate, Identify issues across 3 core disciplines

-Process
-Technology
-People/Behaviors

-Resolve all issues found under all 3 categories
-Measure and monitor new baseline under our optimized environment
-Drive continuous improvement until goal is achieved

Creating a baseline from data that had been validated was key to the success of the improvement effort. Through this process there were many improvements made to our CRM tools, and reporting that raised the visibility of our On-time status. This new visibility allowed us to improve our processes and change agent behaviors to set us up for success with this elusive goal. Over time, with consistent ownership, and accountability the Mid-Market teams achieved the goal for the first time and have continued to meet this goal.

The changes implemented allowed for an amazing turn-around for our support organization and achieving the On-time goal for the first time ever. We set a course and he held to it. With strong leadership, good direction setting, the team stepped up to meet this KPI and have had an extremely positive impact on our customer and partner experience.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):

The deep-dive project focused on several areas for improvement. Outlined below are some of the most impactful changes that were made that allowed us to position ourselves for success achieving the On-time goal and improve the customer’s experience.

Reporting​
Created MM On-Time Dashboard for visibility, outliers, and raw data
Created Open Cycles Health tab to monitor possible issues
Fixed issues with NULL entries reporting incorrectly for engineers

Salesforce Changes​
Corrected Logic with Until Resume Date
Fixed Jira updates from Dev changing the SFDC case to Pending Carb Response and not resetting timer
Updated cases from changing owner to management queue when manager updates the case
SLA Timer corrected for customer portal updates
Highlighted cases at 50% (Yellow) SLA and 100% SLA (Red)
Updated views to see SLA Time Remaining in Column and Response Time
Created Case view for On-Time only for easy visibility and case work for engineers
Combined On-Time only view for all SMB LOBs for ease of workflow for Cross-trained engineers

Process/Behavior Changes​
Updated process and set expectations for night and weekend shift coverage
Educated agents on the definition of On-Time with the rule of three
Active manager monitoring of On-Time views in SFDC
Agent ownership of the On-time view in SFDC
Updated expectations for case work for engineers end of shift wrap up
Reinforce new behaviors in 1: 1s, stand-ups, team meetings, RIAs
Consistent feedback on progress
Attached is supporting documentation showing the positive impact this effort had on key KPIs.

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 department's past performance (up to 250 words):

Implementing On-Time in a support organization represents the best in industry performance, recommended by COPC and other standards and typically leveraged by only the best organizations in the industry. It can be a costly and time consuming KPI to meet. Especially in our org where we have 3 SLAs based on 4 severities (2, 4, and 24 hour response times). Many organizations fail in this area because they simply don’t know about it or don’t have the tools and analytics to support it. As a result, there is an inconsistent customer experience that leads to many challenges, such as we were experiencing. In our case, we had customers randomly calling into support for status updates, artificially increasing our volume by nearly 10%. These inconsistencies also led to customer and partner escalations that pulled our managers, SMEs and account managers onto lengthy weekly ticket review calls that are now no longer necessary.

Since meeting the world class benchmark of 95%, we’ve seen material reductions in inbound volume, active case backlog, contacts to resolve and staffing requirements to meet service level. Our CSAT has gone up, employees are happier, and our sales team is having healthier conversations with customers around renewals, expansion, and general ease of doing business with us. What looked like a minor opportunity to some on the outside has led to a significant shift in the operational hygiene of our business. The focus on meeting customer commitments to this degree has even impacted our culture and customer focus.