CivicPlus Technical Support - Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy

Company: CivicPlus Technical Support: CivicSupport (Manhattan, KS)
Company Description: We Make Government Work Better. CivicPlus understands the challenges communities face today: The need to do more, with less. We build solutions that power local government and enable the core responsibilities of the public sector to build relationships and solve problems affecting millions of citizens world-wide.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy

Nomination Title: CivicPlus Technical Support: Making Government Work Better

This nomination is to recognize the CivicPlus Technical Support teams for honor in the Best Customer Satisfactioncategory because of their efforts to support local government and make our communities a better place to live, investment in training, and measurements of customer satisfaction on every single interaction. Over the years, I have seen the members of this team pour their hearts into helping our customers, but, this year was an exceedingly challenging and unbelievable year to see what this team is really made of.Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we closed our doors, we always thought we would one day be back in the office together – but that time has yet to happen. As our office doors are still closed and we are a workforce working from our homes it has been impressive to see our teams collaborate remotely with the same efficiency and care for each other and our customers as we had when we sat side by side in the office.CivicSupport® strives to provide a reliable, friendly, and effortless support experience for our clients and has truly innovated the way we serve our clients by first focusing on the wildly important impacts to client experience and second by investing personally in our mission: to Make Government Work Better.

Attached, in CivicPlus_Support_Supplimental_Links_and_Resources.pdf you will find a table that illustrates our metric performance over the last 4 years. Since 2018, the CivicPlus Technical Support Team has maintained a high CSAT rating (within 1% net change) while reducing live chat response time by 7.5 minutes and improving our self-service articles so on average 35 more customers a day are able to answer their question without even having to contact the support team. The Knowledge Management / Self-service strategy that we have used since July 2019 has allowed us to utilize AnswerBots to serve customers faster and more efficiently, implement a robust IVR routing solution so we use as little time from our customers as absolutely necessary and review tickets to improve satisfaction on future engagements with customers.

In the last year, this team worked103,756tickets (a 30.1% growth, year over year) with a customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating of 97%, an average chat response time of 2:49 minutes and 45:1 Self Service Score (Help Center page views to every 1 support ticket (125% Improvement). Additionally, since July, theCivicSupport® teams have reflected on our own personal contributions to impact customer experience and implemented a learning goal to have every employee achieve 40 hours of formal learning by the end of the year. To help accomplish this, we built dedicated learning time into service schedules to support our initiative to learn and develop ourselves in ways that will impact our clients. To date, CivicSupport® has completed 1,227hours of formal learningthat have been spent completing technical certifications, shadowing customer engagements, and more! Finally, this team has also achieved several other goals set at the start of the year that includes: launching subscribers to the Status Page for improved crisis communication, developing internal training resources for our staff to train on new products and features, initiatives that support improved employee experience and communication across teams and supporting goals for cross sell initiatives that allowed our teams to exceed their ARR goals for the year, by almost double the original growth plan. We could not have the success we have without each and every one of our team members hard work and motivation to see our customers succeed and give back to their communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed people’s expectations for how they interact with their local government. Suddenly, phone calls and walk-ins were being rapidly replaced by digital and mobile self-service interactions. Local governments that want to meet citizens’ new expectations for contactless government capabilities don’t need to sacrifice the quality of those interactions. In fact, with the right technology and civic experience-focused approach, they can exceed them. Recently, I was afforded an opportunity to be on a call with a prospective customer, a customer who currently had another vendor in our industry and was looking to switch to utilize CivicPlus software and services. When I asked, "what is it you are looking for in a software partner?" they shared with me that CivicPlus stands out in our field because of our people and because of our service reputation, specifically, they said, "you answer when your customers call for help". Its that simple. I am nominating the CivicPlus Technical Support team for recognition of this honor because this team shows up, they are reliable, and they make a difference for our customers. And in our world, being there for each other deserves to be celebrated.

Please reference the attached PDF that offers two videos about CIvicPlus and our Support Team, links to our online resources, metrics, blog article and a couple photos of our team. The metrics and improvements over the last 4 years while maintaining Client Satisfaction ratings really showcases the effort and engagement of this team and that they really care about what we do. Thank you for your time to review this nominationand your consideration of this team for this honor.