Stevie-winner Legal Resources is a legal services provider in the employee benefits space. Legal Resources offers an exclusive network of local primary care law firms to assist employees with all life's legal matters. Legal Resources has been the leading provider and administrator of group legal services for almost 30 years.

Their Business Development team is comprised of Executives, Sales, and Marketing leaders. As a joint effort, these team members collaborate, develop, and deploy strategies that are essential to continual growth in the market. Since the legal services industry remains a niche in nature, unique and effective approaches to product and service creation and marketing are a must; therefore, their marketing and sales strategies are generated in-house.

The Business Development team targets partners like employee benefits consultants, and plan administrators (typically Human Resources professionals) at mid- to large-sized organizations. For growth, the Business Development team markets to multiple channels: benefit consultants to recommend them to their clients, Human Resource professionals to offer their benefit to their workforce, and, eventually, employees to enroll in the plan via payroll deduction.

Increased Growth and Rates of Retention
In response to COVID-19, the Legal Resources Business Development team created and deployed multiple strategies that yielded incredibly favorable growth and retention results. For example, in June 2020 Legal Resources created and launched a Guidance and Assistance program that was open to all of their clients’ employee populations, not just members.

This program offered unlimited guidance and assistance with their Certified Paralegals regarding lifestyle matters; for example, dealing with identity theft, how to file a consumer complaint with the Attorney General’s office, getting in touch with a law firm to get essential documents executed, etc.

Additional projects deployed were centered on education to provide a value add for all growth channels. For example, they created mini seminars that were held virtually and touched on COVID-19-related challenges and how to address them; like consumer issues, COVID-19 scams (like vaccine and employment scams), and information on essential legal documents (like medical directives and power of attorneys).

The Business Development team also executed valuable forecasting on COVID-19 impacts and compiled those forecasts in a COVID-19 Impact newsletter that was sent out to broker partners and clients to be deployed to their workforces. For instance, their team forecasted that the courts being shut down for a period would result in a tremendous backlog in non-emergency hearings and would significantly delay resolutions for open family law cases.

Results
Through collaboration, research, and strategizing as a team, the Legal Resources Business Development team was able to position its products and services strategically; that is, in lieu of being viewed as an expense during an uncertain time, Legal Resources instead positioned itself as a necessary tool that provided peace of mind. The approach was well received.

Providing broker partners and clients with invaluable resources during the thick of the pandemic not only reinforced Legal Resources’ value as an existing partner and vendor but also yielded an 8.6% increase in net membership, which was double the increase from the prior year.

Brokers were happy to be able to forward forecasting information to their clients, helping them reinforce their value and perception of being plugged in. The increase in proposal requests from broker partners soared compared to years prior, validating that their business development efforts were successful with existing and prospective broker partners. Another benefit to their business development response to COVID-19 was clients’ renewed interest in educating their workforces about Legal Resources' plans and services.

Legal Resources won a Gold Stevie Award for Most Valuable Response by a Business Development Team in the 2023 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Pronto Marketing is a WordPress management agency for ambitious businesses around the world. From WordPress builds, maintenance, and support, to SEO and Google Ads services, Pronto offers a full-service approach to getting clients' websites and online marketing presence into high gear.

Founded in 2008, American-owned, and based in Thailand and the Philippines, they have a team of over 100 developers, designers, copywriters, SEO, advertising, and customer support specialists.

Pronto Website Support Team
Pronto provides a variety of website and marketing services to small businesses throughout the world, but their core offering is their Website Support service. In this service, clients pay a monthly fee to receive unlimited access to Website Support team of project managers, support specialists, developers, designers, and copywriters.

They currently manage over 1,200 websites and the Support Team handles between 1,500 to 2,000 support requests per month. These requests range from small tasks such as replacing an image on a client's homepage to very large tasks like writing, designing, and developing a new landing page from scratch.

Despite handling such a large volume and variety of requests, the Support Team has historically been able to send a first response to clients in less than eight business hours, and the team and their work is well-liked by customers, with an average ticket satisfaction rating of 98% and an NPS that typically hovers in the mid-40s.

In the summer of 2020, their Support Team was overwhelmed by incoming tickets. Unfortunately, this resulted in their response time to growing exponentially. Clients were sometimes waiting multiple days to get an initial response, which, of course, also led to a decrease in client satisfaction.

Throughout the remainder of 2020 as well as 2021, the Support Team worked through a series of improvements which included restructuring the team, creating new standard operating procedures for common requests, and perhaps most importantly, adding a night shift to handle requests 24x7.

Today, their average first-response time is under five hours, and first-response time for requests marked as "urgent" is typically less than 20 minutes.

There are two aspects to this improvement that make it significant. First is the magnitude of change. Reducing their first-reply time on all tickets by 80% and by 98% on urgent tickets is an absolutely massive improvement. Over the past six months, they have regularly gotten messages from clients on the improvement and how happy they are. 

Second is the consistency of the improvement. This wasn't a one-time project to improve response time during an emergency, but rather an ongoing series of projects to improve the ability to support clients in the long run. Faster response times have been sustained over the past several months.

Pronto Marketing won a Bronze Stevie^® Award for Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation - Business Services Industries in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

Business Development, Customer Service, and Sales Achievements, Professionals, and More May Be Nominated

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of the world's premier business awards programs, has issued a call for entries for the 2024 (18th annual) Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Entry kits and complete details about the competition are available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/Sales.

Eligible nominees include departments, teams, and professionals from around the world who work in customer service, contact centers, business development, and sales. New products and services and solution providers used by those professionals are also eligible. The 2024 awards will recognize achievements since July 1, 2021.

The early-bird entry deadline, with reduced entry fees, is October 11, 2023. The final entry deadline is November 8, but late entries will be accepted through January 24, 2023, with payment of a late fee. Finalists will be announced on March 5, and the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be revealed during an awards ceremony on April 12 in Las Vegas.

The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service feature more than 150 sales awards, customer service awards, business development awards, new product awards, thought leadership, and solution provider awards categories. Entrants may submit any number of nominations to any number of categories, which include:

• Sales Individual categories such as Senior Sales Executive of the Year and Sales Representative of the Year
  ● Sales Team categories like Global Sales Team of the Year and Online Sales Team of the Year
  ● Sales Achievement categories such as Sales Turnaround of the Year and Sales Training or Coaching Program of the Year
  ● Sales Distinction categories in 14 industry groupings
  ● Customer Service and Contact Center Individual categories such as Front-Line Customer Service Professional of the Year and Customer Service Leader of the Year
  ● Customer Service and Contact Center Team categories like Contact Center of the Year and Back Office Customer Service Team of the Year
  ● Customer Service and Contact Center Achievement categories such as e-Commerce Customer Service Award and Award for Innovation in Customer Service
  ● Customer Service Department categories in 12 industry groupings
  ● Customer Service Success categories in five industry groupings
  ● New Product and Service categories like Best New Business Intelligence Solution and Best New Marketing Solution
  ● Solution Provider categories such as Sales Consulting Practice of the Year and Incentive, Rewards, or Recognition Provider of the Year
  ● Business Development categories such as Business Development Professional of the Year and Business Development Achievement of the Year - Hospitality & Leisure
  ● Thought Leadership categories such as Best Use of Thought Leadership in Sales, Best Use of Thought Leadership in Business Development, and Best Use of Thought Leadership in Customer Service

Two new Sales Achievement categories have been added to recognize accomplishments in sales automation and sales self-service. Explore all of the categories here.

2024 will see the return of the People's Choice Stevie® Awards for Favorite Customer Service, a popular feature of the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service in which the public may vote for their favorite providers of customer service, from among all finalist nominations in the Customer Service Department of the Year categories.

Winners of the 2023 edition of the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service included AT&T, Banco Popular Dominicano, Care.com, Cisco Systems, Cvent Inc., DHL Express Worldwide, Dubai Airports, Easyship, Enerjisa Enerji, GoHealth, HP, IBM, Michael Kors, Modern Campus, Nasdaq Governance Solutions, Pan American Energy, PT Telkom Indonesia (Persero) Tbk, SAP, SoftPro, Splunk, Support Services Group, ValueSelling Associates, VIZIO Inc., Vodafone Turkey, and many more.

The 2024 competition will be judged by more than 150 professionals around the world. Those interested in participating on one of the juries may apply at https://sales.stevieawards.com/sa-judge/register.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Belkins Agency was forged on a common idea: predictable and scalable growth achieved through transparency, perseverance, experience, and creativity.

Belkins was founded by Vladyslav Podolyako and Michael Maximoff back in 2017. Shortly before, they worked together at a small product company. They both shared an extensive background in B2B sales that produced a compatible synergy and would later be transformed into an equivocal business partnership.

The start-up humbly began with Michael and Vlad generating leads for small businesses, committing 100% of their time and efforts to their "side hustle." Soon their creativity and passion paid off.

A startup blossomed into a full-scale digital marketing agency producing $10 million ARR and serving 1000 customers worldwide. In just five years, Belkins grew into the #1 ranked leading provider of lead generation and appointment-setting services despite their decision to forgo any outside investments.

Belkins has now helped 400+ clients transform their presales and sales processes. They have worked with clients from 30+ countries in 60+ niches to help them build and transform their sales workflow. The goal was not only to help companies define their ICP (ideal client profile), build a pipeline of qualified leads, and drive sales for the fastest possible ROI but to make it digital, scalable, and as predictable as possible.

Helping Business Scale Quickly
Belkins empowers businesses of any scale to grow fast through cutting-edge technologies and innovative marketing and sales solutions.

Their primary offering is lead generation and appointment-setting, but they offer much more. If they can’t find a worthy solution in the market, they create it. Since 2020 they have launched several products and a new service line. Now their clients can count on 99% inbox deliverability and a 60% increase in their email open rate using Folderly, streamline their cold outreach with Frostbite.ia, and acquire endless qualified leads using the Leadsforce service. Additionally, with Charge for Outlook, clients can seamlessly send bulk outreach, enhancing their email campaigns further. 

Over the last 12 months, their approach generated over $50 million in new sales for 200 of their clients. Furthermore, on average, the amount of new deals is $50,000 USD. From the kick-off meeting to the first email sent, they get the client’s campaign running in six days or less. The number of leads their team has generated by now is close to 5 million, and emails that reached prospects’ inboxes are about 3 million.

The technological products and services they create are tightly interconnected, creating a sort of MarTech ecosystem inside the company. This way, clients can satisfy all their needs in boosting their business growth with digital marketing and sales services from Belkins Group.

Some of the industries Belkins worked with were quite conservative prior to their partnership: solar & renewable energy, food catering, healthcare, agriculture, waste management, janitorial services, etc. As a result of partnering, clients now receive a faster-than-expected ROI, and a vault of best-kept "secrets" to generate leads by means of email outreach, LinkedIn, HubSpot, and by using dozens of data sources combined with their own proprietary software.

They say they are most proud of the cases where they’ve been able to completely transform a customer's sales process and cycle, showing their customers that digital and scalable solutions for business growth can be predictable.

Belkins won two Silvers and a Bronze Stevie^® Award including the Sales Ethics Award, Achievement in the Digital Transformation of Sales Operations, and Sales Outsourcing Provider of the Year, respectively, in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

Stevie-winner Quantum Workplace, a human resources technology provider, equips workplaces with the smartest talent solutions so that they can grow and succeed.

Nearly 20 years ago, the company pioneered some of the earliest employee engagement and performance software and has since partnered with thousands of organizations to drive employee, team, and business success.

Today, human resources (HR) departments have more on their plate than ever before. Quantum Workplace aims to be the reliable partner HR needs to solve problems and guide them along the way.

The organization began as Quantum Market Research in 2002, conducting workplace surveys. By 2005, it  was the survey provider behind the Best Places to Work contest. In 2009, it collected its five-millionth survey. The company changed its name to Quantum Workplace in 2010 and transitioned into a software-led employee engagement company. Now the company partners with over 480 organizations to make work better.

Achieving Consistent Customer and Employee Success
Quantum Workplace has a legacy of providing awesome customer service with unmatched, quality support. The Customer Success Team developed a series of checkpoints that new hires complete before they start talking with customers, so each customer receives the best service and guidance.

A team of Insights Analysts helps customers dive deep into what their data says, how to interpret their results, and guide them in responses. The team has a 97% favorability on value provided to the board room.

Quantum Workplace’s NPS and CSAT scores are well above industry averages, and their six-month rolling average NPS score is 62.5, with industry averages around 40. Quantum Workplace’s August 2022 CSAT score was 86, with industry averages around 77.

The Quantum Workplace Customer Support Team is available to over 2 million users, not just admin users, unlike the competition and others in B2B software. This means more users to assist, which might mean more time per ticket. Not the case at Quantum Workplace. The Customer Support Team typically responds within an hour, faster than most SaaS companies and competitors.

Quantum Workplace employees, or "Qwirks," are used to a high-growth environment. They’re able to succeed because the organization practices what it preaches. It believes that employee success leads to business success. Its dedication to employees has led the Customer Facing Team to achieve levels of customer satisfaction few software companies can.

Because of its unique culture aimed at engaging employees, Qwirks perform at high levels, outpacing its competition and setting new standards for the software industry.

Although it has been challenging, they have been able to maintain customer satisfaction and the employee experience with 30% employee growth in the past two years. Quantum Workplace’s strategy of concentrating on employee success has shown business success and led to a quality customer experience.

Quantum Workplace believes the workplace can be great when employees are given the opportunity and resources to be successful. Quantum Workplace’s 4.9 Glassdoor rating far exceeds the average company rating of 3.3, and 100% of Glassdoor reviewers reported they would recommend a friend to work for the organization.

Quantum Workplace created a culture that employees want to be a part of by giving them the tools to succeed and a unique work experience they enjoy. The organization is stronger because Qwirks are celebrated team members and united through the core values of Pursue, Team Over Self, Revel in Work, and Be You.

Qwirks are passionate about their work. The Customer Facing Team revels in providing excellent customer service and truly believes what they do matters. That experience helps Quantum Workplace separate itself from not only competitors but other workplaces.

Quantum Workplace won a Silver Stevie^® Award for Customer Service Department of the Year - Computer Software - 100 or More Employees, and a Bronze Stevie for Customer Service Employer of the Year in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

Stevie-winner Zywave provides software and technology solutions for the insurance industry in the United States and internationally. It offers cloud-based sales management, client delivery, content, and analytics solutions.

More than 15,000 carriers, agencies, and brokerages worldwide—including all of the top 100 US insurance brokerages—use Zywave solutions to enhance client services, achieve business growth, and promote greater health, wellness, risk management, and safety.

Zywave’s all-in-one platform provides customizable, user-friendly options that enable insurance professionals to build a unique solution to fit their specific growth goals.

Prioritizing Customer Experience
The company’s support organization of 50 agents handles around 100,000 complex cases per year.

Led by VP of Support, Emre Tekoglu, the support team was looking to transform from a reactive model to a more proactive support experience. Additionally, Emre wanted to shift from a cost center to position support as a strategic element of the overall customer experience. 

They eventually deployed SupportLogic to predict potential escalations, as well as automate case evaluation and review. SupportLogic generated escalation predictions, provided customer sentiment trend analysis, and surfaced the best cases for managers to review.

SupportLogic helped Zywave quickly become more proactive and predictive by enabling managers and agents to better prioritize focus and customer outreach. Zywave also reduced escalations and kept CSAT metrics strong, achieving 96% satisfaction score for the month of July 2023. They plan to continue to work with SupportLogic to keep escalations low and draw from teachable moments for case reviews.

Not only has Zywave Support made significant technology investments to power improvement of the customer support experience, but also to improve the support reps' experience.

Expanding Global Support Operations
Zywave Support has transitioned from the central Milwaukee location with 28 support representatives into global support operations with over 70 people in various locations, including the Philippines, Boston, Dallas, and other remote locations, by embracing change management over the last two years. 

They have now shifted from reactive to proactive support in everyone's desired state in customer service organizations by prioritizing the right cases using AI/NLP technology. They can effectively predict 70% of escalations before they happen by leveraging their data and insights.

Support is now a destination career path for both internal and external candidates. The changes they made enabled the support team to become the most successful department in the company based on employee retention, even when the whole industry was facing widespread resignations.

Since Winning Their Stevie^® Award
Through the convergence of process, technology, and most importantly, their people, Zywave is committed to delivering the optimal customer experience. They recognize this is an ongoing journey that demands a growth mindset and continuous learning.

Since the application period, Zywave has focused on the following:

New process - They launched a new function in support for incidents. By deploying a critical incident response function, they demonstrate their commitment to proactively address and mitigate issues that affect multiple customers, ensuring swift and effective resolutions to preserve their trust and satisfaction.

Focus on support team’s growth - They have introduced a volunteer day off option for employees to prioritize their support team members' personal growth and community engagement, while also cultivating a culture of empathy and social responsibility within the organization.

Further technology investment - By continually reviewing and adopting AI-powered solutions and emerging support trends, including case resolution using robotic process automation, they consistently optimize their ability to reduce time to resolution and elevate customer satisfaction levels, cementing their position as a customer-centric organization.

Zywave won a Silver Stevie Award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service – Computer Industries, and Bronze in the category of Achievement in the Use of Data & Analytics in Customer Service in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

Stevie-winner SmartBear provides a portfolio of trusted tools that give software development teams around the world visibility into end-to-end quality through test management and automation, API development lifecycle, and application stability, ensuring each software release is better than the last. Award-winning tools include SwaggerHub, TestComplete, BugSnag, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, and PactFlow, among others.

The company’s mission is to be the first choice for software development teams of all sizes, giving them the tools to immediately impact the delivery of tomorrow’s applications. The tools they develop are built to streamline clients’ processes while seamlessly working with the products they currently use and will continue to use. 

In the 2023 Stevie^® Awards for Sales & Customer Service, the SmartBear Test Management Team, led by Jeannie Kobert, Director of Customer Care Engineering at SmartBear, won a Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year - Technology Industries. 

Integrating Open Source and Openness Altogether
SmartBear’s philosophy is not only to embrace open source, but openness altogether, which includes diversity, equity, and inclusion. With these principles as their foundation, they ensure that their tools are easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to integrate. 

The SmartBear Test Management team, consisting of the Zephyr Enterprise and Zephyr Squad product lines, provides 24/5 technical support to a global set of customers located in AMER, EMEA, and APAC. The team supports both SaaS and On-Premises (server and data center) solutions and provides expertise for all aspects of product usage and configuration, as well as resolving the most difficult technical issues. 

The Test Management team also includes Zephyr Scale products, SaaS, and On-Premises (server and data center) solutions and provides  similar technical services as Zephyr Enterprise and Zephyr Squad.

The Test Management team has consistently received high Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores and tracked at a high level against their published service level agreements (SLAs), keeping their customers happy. In fact, the team has been able to retain an elevated level of customer service consistently when it was particularly challenging during the pandemic and great resignation in 2020 and beyond. This is due to the team’s commitment to customer service by increasing man hours, utilizing development resources, and taking advantage of an innovative cross-training plan the team adopted last year.

Leading by Example
By committing to ethical corporate practices that promote good, SmartBear has pledged to continue building quality businesses in their global communities through integrity.

They are committed to taking the journey toward becoming a leader in corporate social responsibility as they grow. To that end, they have a group of senior leaders who meet regularly as a working group to focus on the areas of Community, Sustainability, Governance, and Diversity.

SmartBear is trusted by over 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers at 32,000+ organizations—including innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft.

The SmartBear Test Management Team won a Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year - Technology Industries in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Regalix is a global leader partnering with companies on revenue operations, customer experience, and thought leadership. They are a growth-based enterprise that helps digital platforms drive growth from their mid-market and small/medium business (SMB) segments by handling the whole range of sales/growth lifecycle. 

For 10+ years across 16+ countries, Regalix has been driving revenue growth for digital platforms by selling their complex services to SMBs and assisting them in building their sales infrastructure, contributing to more than $10 billion in revenue for world-renowned brands.

They have helped over 150+ iconic Fortune 500 brands, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, and others, unlock opportunities and business possibilities at scale.

Highlighted Projects
For one client, Regalix enabled increased ad adoptions among its SMB markets and helped increase the business's revenue by 3.5X. They achieved this by implementing targeted marketing campaigns focused on the businesses' specific needs and pain points. 

This included creating tailored ad packages that offer more cost-effective solutions for smaller budgets and providing education and resources to the advertisers on the benefits of utilizing ads. Ultimately, the brand increased its overall revenue by 81% within two years, while the total cost of generating this revenue remained the same.

For another client from the F&B sector, they helped increase merchant adoption by 95%. They significantly increased the client's success in pre-sales activities by implementing targeted marketing campaigns that effectively reached their target audience.

Additionally, they streamlined the merchant signup process. In post-sales activities, they focused on providing onboarding support. Overall, these strategies increased the client’s merchant base with a conversion ratio of 51%, increased revenue by 88%, and improved customer satisfaction.

Ingredients to Success
Regalix’s secret to achieving success on a much higher level when compared to its competitors is due to its in-house AI-based platform designed to help train and assist sales reps in all aspects of call management, from initial training to ongoing skill development.

The platform streamlines the sales process and allows for end-to-end lifecycle management, resulting in a faster ramp-up time for new reps, a higher ROI, and an overall improvement in sales performance.

One of the key features of the platform is its comprehensive training modules. These modules cover all aspects of the sales call process, from basic selling techniques to advanced strategies for closing deals. The interactive and engaging modules make it easy for sales reps to learn and retain the information.

The platform offers AI-based pitch intelligence and a coaching feature. The coaching feature allows reps to boost their confidence with virtual pitch practice. This helps reps to improve their skills and techniques on the fly. In addition to training and coaching, the platform also helps to refine sales reps' skills. It tracks key performance metrics such as call duration, conversion rates, and win/loss ratios which managers can use to assess progress.

This AI-based platform provides a powerful toolset to help train and assist our sales reps, ensuring they have the necessary skills to succeed and providing feedback and guidance to help them improve their performance.

Regalix won a Bronze Stevie^® Award for Account Management Team of the Year in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Searchspring is an agile site search, merchandising, and product recommendation solution taking e-commerce findability to the next level. Searchspring enables brands to get the right product, to the right person, at the right time.

Searchspring was founded in 2007 in Colorado Springs with a vision of creating a platform that would provide state-of-the-art site search and merchandising to online retailers. It was soon discovered there was a huge demand for this technology due to gaps in native e-commerce platforms.

At its core, Searchspring is dedicated to helping brands deliver the ultimate shopper experience through its search, merchandising, and personalization platform. To accomplish this mission, the company has prioritized the success of its clients and growing a team that fully supports and understands the needs of merchants.

Since its early days, Searchspring created separate customer support and customer success teams designed to address clients’ technical and strategic needs, respectively. The support team works on the technical complexities of the solution. The success team provides strategic guidance on how to deliver the right product to the right person at the right time. Together, the teams collaborate and ensure they provide best-in-class service, serving nearly 1,500 brands in the past 15 years.

Searchspring’s teams are motivated by serving clients’ strategic needs first, rather than the bottom line. When clients see that Searchspring’s customer support team has no underlying motives to sell more solutions, clients have greater trust in Searchspring’s solutions and the company overall. 

Searchspring’s team is also trained to approach each client uniquely. While many other teams take a cookie-cutter approach for all clients, Searchspring’s team treats each client’s site individually.
Another key factor to Searchspring’s success is bringing good people to the company. Searchspring knows that to provide the best customer experience to brands, the company needs to hire the right people for its clients. Searchspring does this by hiring slowly, which ensures it builds a team that has both retail and e-commerce experience, as well as diverse skill sets. Searchspring’s team members truly understand the shopping journey, which enables them to help clients create the best e-commerce experience for customers like.

Since Winning a Stevie
Recently, Searchspring has experienced exponential growth by investing in its product, process, and team. In 2022, Searchspring signed over 250 new customers and secured an investment from PSG, a leading growth equity firm.

To maximize the reach and success of its product portfolio, Searchspring expanded its leadership team to include a new chief customer officer, chief technology officer, and senior vice president of global sales.

In response to the company’s steadfast pursuit of customer satisfaction, Searchspring was recognized by several award programs since submitting for the Stevie^® Awards, including San Antonio Business Journal’s Business of the Year.

Searchspring won a Bronze Stevie Award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Output is a global leader in music creation, inspiring people at all levels—from newcomers to professionals. Output develops innovative software and gear for musicians, composers, producers, and sound designers across all genres.

Launched in 2013, Output’s software is used by hitmakers such as Kendrick Lamar, Bjork, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Imagine Dragons, Coldplay, and Drake, to name a few. It has also been used to create musical scores for films and shows such as Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and more.

The Output Customer Support team lives and breathes music. They describe themselves as a group of professional musicians who decided that they wanted to work with and help other musicians be creative. The Support team originally started in 2016 with a two-person team taking requests via email. Slowly that evolved into using a traditional support ticketing system.

Shifts in the Global Music Industry
By 2020 during the height of the pandemic, their flagship product Arcade hit an all-time high for users. In addition to Arcade, they were having record sales in plugins/instruments and for their studio hardware line of products.

The team needed to scale even more, as they saw upwards of 50k support tickets per year. With long wait times and inefficient procedures, making a change was necessary. At the end of 2021, they brought on a seasoned Customer Service Manager. With fresh leadership onboard, they then made immediate changes to daily operations, such as internal meeting management and incorporating SMS and social media channels for users.

The past three years brought on massive changes to the world and the music industry. Musicians started creating their own home studios, and recording at home was more popular than ever. Companies like Output had to scale and quickly. When they assessed their Customer Support, they determined the need to find better strategies, looking to achieve faster response times and improve their knowledge base and overall customer satisfaction.

Working on three areas essentially had a domino effect. By improving the customer knowledge base, users are able to easily find the troubleshooting steps they need without even contacting support. But if they need to contact support, getting back to them as quickly as possible is extremely important—if they are waiting for a solution that means they are not working or creating. By improving their first-response time from 30+ hours to 5 hours, users were able to get back to work quicker and increased the overall satisfaction rate.

They also enhanced processes for their internal team by creating career paths for each support team member. Many reps are able to split their time between Support and other teams (e.g., QA, Edu, Product) eventually leading to a promotion and/or more responsibilities. In the past two years, five members of the support team have been promoted to Senior Support Rep or are leading a project outside of support.

Since earning their Stevie^® Award, Output has continued to improve on their user promise of "keeping you in session," by improving first-response times, adding new options to contact Support, and overall improvements in products. They are now exploring ways to add more self-service options for users and are incorporating AI into workflows.

Output won a Silver Stevie Award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries - Software in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?