Duda - Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year

Company: Duda Inc, Palo Alto, CA
Company Description: Duda is the leading web design platform for all companies that offer web design services to small businesses. The Company serves all types of customers, from freelance web professionals and digital agencies, to the largest hosting companies, SaaS platforms and online publishers in the world.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: HOW DUDA BECAME A CUSTOMER SERVICE LEADER IN A HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CATEGORY

About Duda
Duda is a white label web design platform for digital agencies, SaaS companies, and businesses offering web design services to small businesses (SMBs). Every day, we seek to equip our customers with the best tools on the market for creating beautiful websites, streamlining the web design workflow, and fostering long-lasting team-client relationships through collaboration. Whenever we empower our customers to get more done in less time, we succeed.

Helping Our Customers Grow
2019 was an incredible year of growth for Duda. Coming into the new year, our leadership team met to discuss our company’s vision for 2020. Through our amazing support team, we saw a major opportunity to take our services to the next level.

With the right people, processes, and tools in place, we believed our customer service professionals could not only continue to help our customers learn our platform and troubleshoot issues, but also help our customers to grow their businesses. With this goal in mind, we optimized our support channels, redesigned our resources, and introduced several new programs, tools, and incentives throughout 2020.

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

Achieving Higher Quality…
As we grew in 2020, we wanted to better accommodate our customers’ specific needs. To do so, we added new support team members from a wide range of professional and personal backgrounds, including teachers, developers, and dedicated technical experts, from around the world. With greater diversity and a more technical skillset, we’re able to deliver specialized responses, allow customers to build more complex and dynamic websites, offer culturally-competent support, launch dedicated support channels in Portguese and Spanish, and show increased empathy for our customers’ unique situations.

...And Speed
Whenever an issue arises, we know that speed matters as much as quality. To provide faster responses, we optimized our ticketing system to prioritize the most urgent requests, while still maintaining a fast SLA for all customers. Additionally, we partnered with Engineering to mandate response times around different severities of bugs and made QA improvements to make sure new products and features are released at a higher quality than ever before.

In 2020, we also launched true live chat, enabling our customers to get the help they need from Duda experts in real time on chat or phone. These improvements led to significant increases in our customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020: from 93% to 98% for phone support; 91% to 95% for email; and 89% to 98% for live chat.

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

Navigating a Global Pandemic
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring, we quickly rolled out special offers created to help our customers survive, and thrive, in uncertain times; everything from discounted site plans and free websites for local SMBs to App Store offers and free eCommerce plans for online stores. We also created free content that was hyper-relevant to COVID-19, including white label marketing materials, blogs, and workshops covering topics such as the PPP (Paycheck Protection Program).

Duda University Kickoff
In September 2020, as part of our continual efforts to empower our customers, we launched Duda University, an educational resource where our customers can take free, on-demand courses in web design, sales, marketing and more; many of them taught by members of our support team. Through “Duda U,” our customers can build important career skills and earn certifications that give them a competitive edge in their industries. Currently, over 700 web pros have been certified.

Ranked #1 By Our Customers
Our greatest achievements in 2020 are not our growth or revenue, but rather the tangible differences we’ve made in our customers’ lives, especially in challenging times. We are proud to be recognized as both a G2 Website Builder Leader and G2 Best Support winner for three consecutive seasons, ahead of other leading platforms including WordPress and Webflow. Each distinction means a great deal to us because they’re based on real reviews from our beloved customers. We promise to keep delivering best-in-class partnership in 2021 and beyond.

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):

Accomplishments
-Successfully launched 24x7 Support.
-Introduced a new Live Chat feature to further expand our real-time support.
-Opened full support channels in Portuguese and Spanish for customers based in Latin America (LATAM).
-Created Duda University, an online education and certification program.
-Improved our ticket monitoring system and changed our SLA to ensure follow-up response times to one day or less.
-Worked closely alongside the Duda R&D team to create a product development cycle based on customer feedback.
-Achieved 95%+ CSAT scores across all service channels.
-Surpassed 400 5-star ratings on G2 and Google Reviews.
-Earned 49 G2 badges for excellence in product and support during summer, fall, and winter 2020.

Duda University Landing Page https://university.duda.co/
COVID-19 Response Landing Page https://lp.duda.co/covid-19
Meet a Local Techie Going Above and Beyond to Help in Tough Times - Built in Colorado Article https://www.builtincolorado.com/2020/04/17/local-techie-going-above-and-beyond

Duda Support Portals:

https://support.duda.co/hc/en-us

https://support.duda.co/hc/es-419

https://support.duda.co/hc/pt-br