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? 

Stevie^®-winner Capital Rx was founded in 2017 as a next-generation pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), overseeing prescription benefit plans on behalf of employers, unions, municipalities, hospital systems, and health plans. In just 3 years, Capital RX has become the fastest growing PBM in America, with award-winning technology, innovation, and a true commitment to service.

In 2021, Capital Rx launched JUDI™, an intuitive, cloud-native, API-based enterprise pharmacy platform (EPP), the first of its kind in the pharmacy industry.  JUDI significantly reduces administrative overhead, advances clinical management, and dramatically improves the customer’s care experience. In addition, the platform connects every aspect of the pharmacy ecosystem in one platform. JUDI™ is a radical departure from status quo PBM technology: on-premise systems running on mainframes, green-screen terminals, and programming languages from the 1990s, each contributing to a broken healthcare system and placing disproportionate responsibility onto patients, insurers and pharmacies.

JUDI powers all aspects of Capital Rx, including its pricing model and its new Advantage card. The Advantage card is the first ethical prescription discount card launched in August and saves consumers up to 90% on their prescription costs. It beats popular discount cards 80% of the time by implementing its Clearinghouse Model drug pricing strategy.

Capital Rx won the Bronze Stevie Award for the 2022 Customer Service Department of the Year. In addition, Will Tafoya, SVP, Customer Care at Capital Rx, won the Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Leader of the Year.

Since winning their awards, Capital Rx has continued to enhance their services and customer satisfaction. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) references the customers likelihood to recommend Capital Rx by rating their experience with the Customer Care team. For 2022 year to date, Capital Rx has maintained an average score of approximately 70%, which is well above the industry average.

For 2022 year to date, the Capital Rx Customer Care team has also sustained a score of 4.8 out of 5, which is based on a 5-point scale measuring how satisfied customers are with their service. In addition, Capital Rx has maintained a minimum Call Quality Score of 92%, which references the overall quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the Capital Rx Customer Care team.

Accreditation in any industry is important for accountability and quality assurance. URAC is a non-profit, nationwide accrediting organization dedicated to ensuring the highest standards of care are achieved within the healthcare industry. In 2022, Capital Rx achieved URAC accreditation by meeting elevated standards in the following areas: consistent achievement of Industry best practices; continuous quality improvement; protecting and empowering consumers.

Capital Rx’s goal is to create lasting social change by developing a better healthcare infrastructure that eliminates conflicts of interest, simplifies contracting, and generates immediate savings. Their technology-driven innovations inform better plan management, and their high-touch service approach allows them to provide unparalleled member service with better financial outcomes for their clients.

Capital Rx won the Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year. Will Tafoya, SVP, Customer Care at Capital Rx, won the Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Leader of the Year in the 2022 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in submitting nominations in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of the world’s premier business awards programs, has issued a call for entries for the 2023 (17th 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 2023 awards will recognize achievements since July 1, 2020.

The early-bird entry deadline, with reduced entry fees, is October 12, 2022. The final entry deadline is November 9, but late entries will be accepted through January 11, 2023, with payment of a late fee. Finalists will be announced January 24, and the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be revealed during an awards ceremony on March 3 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

There are many new categories for 2023 including Achievement in the Use of Data & Analytics in Sales, Achievement in the Digital Transformation of Sales Operations, Achievement in Sales Documentation, Achievement in Value-based Selling Techniques, Achievement in Customer Experience, Achievement in Customer Service Automation, and Achievement in the Use of Data & Analytics in Customer Service. Explore all the categories here.

2023 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 2022 edition of the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service included ADP Retirement Services, Best Buy Canada, Care.com, Cvent Inc., DHL Express, GoDaddy, HP Inc., IBM, Intuit, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Michael Kors, Microsoft Corporation, Nasdaq Governance Solutions, Nutrisystem, PushPay, Princess Polly, Public.com, Salary.com, SAP, ServiceNow, Sun Basket, QNB Finansbank, Vizio Inc., VMWare, Vodafone Turkey, Wolters Kluwer's ELM Solutions, and many more.

The 2023 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.

Stevie^®-winner Tufin is a security policy management company specializing in the automation of security policy changes across hybrid platforms while improving security and compliance. Tufin simplifies management of some of the largest, most complex networks in the world, consisting of thousands of firewall and network devices and emerging hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Since its inception, Tufin solutions have been purchased by more than 2,000 customers in over 70 countries. Tufin’s Technical Support team is dedicated to making these deployments a reality for customers, leading them in their operationalization of Tufin to drive value and ROI to their business.

With three Centers of Excellence around the globe, Tufin offers 24x7 follow-the-sun support, several levels of fee-based technical support, and free opportunities for customer support and troubleshooting.

A major initiative across the company in 2021 was the migration of customers from the classic Tufin Orchestration Suite to a new platform known as Tufin Aurora. The support team was pivotal to the successful migration of customers to the new platform.

As customers schedule their migrations, the support team coordinates them across the global customer base to ensure there is enough staff to cover any troubleshooting issues that arise. Each customer has access to a dedicated Slack channel with on-call support engineers and their Tufin account team.

In addition, the team experienced a 60% increase in headcount globally since 2019 with a focus on hiring a more senior skills set. Many new hires on the support team have a more technical background and more years of experience. This not only increases the technical acumen of the entire team, but it means faster onboarding and easier case resolution.

Lastly, the team recently created a Support Escalation Team, dedicated to working on cases that are unable to be solved in support. The team receives these cases to solve or identifies where the bug is in the product and passes it on to R&D to fix.

Tufin won the Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year - Computer Hardware in the 2022 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. 

Submit your nominations for the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Stevie^® Award-winner Limitless is combining crowdsourcing and AI to help global businesses address their biggest customer service challenges with Gig Customer Service (GigCX). GigCX is the term they use for deploying a gig-based crowd of people to provide customer service and sales. Housed within the Limitless’ SmartCrowd™ platform, customers can connect with their most engaged customers and reward them for providing on-demand customer service.

Using this technology, organizations route enquiries through the Limitless platform, which distributes them to knowledgeable GigCX experts who are paid per task for resolving questions. Brands like Microsoft, Unilever, eBay and L’Oreal are using Limitless GigCX to connect with their most engaged customers, providing on-demand customer service that can flex in line with demand.

Limitless conducts annual research studies and reports to understand how GigCX is impacting the workforce and areas for improvement. Since receiving their Gold Stevie award, they have released new research that shows that 72% of customer service managers have added or plan to add gig talent to customer service or sales operations within the next 2 years.

Their findings also show that, although people are interested in flexibility and the freedom to earn money on their own terms, GigCX has another added benefit to other gig models. Experts are genuinely interested in helping people using their own knowledge for brands they love.

Limitless has also been featured in Forbes in the article “Meet the Startup Turning Customers into Next-Gen Customer Service for Brands They Love.” In the piece, Forbes references a study that shows there are “nearly 60 million gig workers in the U.S., representing about $1.2 trillion of U.S. GDP, [and] it’s estimated that by 2030, nearly 50% of the workforce will be engaged in the gig economy in some way.”

Limitless co-founders Megan Neale and Roger Beadle have over 20 years of experience in the customer support world. In a comment to Forbes, Ms. Neale says she believes “gig work will be a mix of primary full-time workers, GigCX workers, and AI bots working in harmony to produce the most efficient and best possible customer experience….once AI does its job to the capacity it's able to, handing that customer over to a real customer support agent with the skills to help quickly.

Limitless won the Gold Stevie Award for Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year.

Submit your nomination for the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Family-owned and operated Ace Office Furniture Houston is a Stevie®-winning top-rated furniture company based in Texas. They serve as a one-stop shop for many business owners in the area who rely on them, not only for quality office furniture, but also for their customer service offerings including highly skilled staff, onsite consultations, fast delivery, commercial office staging, and furniture repairs.Their business has a long track record of excellence in the region, drawing initial recognition in only 2 years from the Better Business Bureau (BBB), gaining an A+ Rating with the BBB for four years, and receiving the BBB Award for Excellence in 2019 and 2020.

Ace Office Furniture Houston strives to provide the best support to their customers for all of their business needs, and their expert consultants work closely with them to provide advice and guidance through the process of conceptualizing, designing, selecting, delivering, and installing their furnishings.

Since receiving their Bronze Stevie Award for Best in Sales Ethics, owner Kevin Astala, has been honored with inclusion in the Who’s Who in America. Mr Astala attributes his success to hard work and learning new skills and trades, he said in a press release. In addition to teaching himself internet webpage design, he has learned the intricacies of marketing and social media. Mr. Astala has also been featured in Millennium Magazine for his entrepreneurial skills and dedication to self-education.

In light of their continued success, Ace Office Furniture Houston has announced the expansion of their services to new areas in Texas.

Ace Office Furniture Houston won the Bronze Stevie Award for Ethics in Sales.

Submit nominations for the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Founded in 1993 by Jay Bruber, Stevie^®-winner Persolvent specializes in payment processing technologies for markets including education, professional service organizations, internet, government, before and after school programs, and enrichment programs.Persolvent views their customer relationships as true partnerships. They offer industry-leading technology and have a large customer base, but they are intentionally focused and small enough to be able to respond to customer needs with lightning-fast agility. 

Persolvent services and personnel were recognized in three different Stevie Awards categories: 

• AJ Kurkowski won the Gold Stevie Award for Customer Service Training Professional of the Year;
• Marit Faster won the Silver Stevie Award for Customer Service Leader of the Year; and
• Eleyo Customer Experience Strategy won the Bronze Stevie Award for Best Customer Feedback Strategy.

Since gaining this recognition, Persolvent has continued in its goal to better serve their customers. In Q1 2022, Eleyo’s Customer Experience Strategy saw a Net Promoter Score of 69, which is 33 points above the industry average and also the highest score that has been received since the pandemic in 2020.

In the time since receiving their awards, AJ Kurkowski has implemented a new team called the Enterprise Team, which will help implement the Eleyo software for the largest childcare and community education programs in the United States. Marit Fastner has joined the leadership team for a new 2022 Persolvent product. She is focused on building out the process for customer success from training to support for product launch.

Interested in submitting nominations for the
2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

Stevie Award-winner SmartHub is a programmatic, white-label RTB solution designed to facilitate ad tech market entry for companies that plan to set up their own branded marketplaces. It is designed for small and medium-sized ad tech businesses, ad networks, SSPs that need to build their own ad tech platforms while saving money and time. Their mission is to maintain the highest standards for marketplace transparency, accountability, and trust.

SmartHub was created in 2018, when a small team of skilled professionals grew their internal programmatic expertise. After this, they started to provide companies with robust technologies based on which enterprises could build their own independent ad marketplaces. With their unique  platform, customers can leverage technology that enables the most rapid market entry and continuing growth. Over the past two years, SmartHub has been able to advance their abilities in order to deploy a programmatic marketplace in just 7 days. Additionally, their company offers uncommon services such as ad tech outstaffing.

The SmartHub team has spent countless hours designing and building AdTech platforms for their clients. Their customers include those that have started and strengthened their ad businesses. They have also created a very responsive customer service team full of well-versed employees in numerous disciplines including tech, advertising, business development, and client relationships.

Since winning the Bronze Stevie for Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy, SmartHub has evolved significantly both in terms of technology and human resources. During 2020, SmartHub survived a global economic crisis and successfully entered a new technologic cycle, during which the business expanded to a new market – Israel - then explored the Asian region (Hong Kong, China), LATAM (Argentina, Uruguay), USA and Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine). Also in 2020, SmartHub technology was adopted by 59 new customers. The net profit during 2020 grew to reach the bar of $47,938.42. Income in 2020 increased in comparison to 2019 which is substantial growth for a young investment project.

Their agile approach, responsiveness to the market's change and attentiveness to the needs of their clients have defined the success of our product. During 2020, the team spent over 2,700 hours designing and building AdTech platforms for their clients. Сlient-centricity is central to their strategy, so during the pandemic, they optimally redistributed the SmartHub team and augmented expertise in technologies that boost the businesses of customers. SmartHub developed a tool that enables setting up an independent ad exchange that makes it possible to easily and quickly deploy and adjust it to the user’s needs. 

SmartHub won the Bronze Stevie for Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy at the 2022 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in submitting nominations in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?

Stevie Award-winner Fleetio provides an alternative to spreadsheets and outdated fleet software, designed to help automate fleet operations and keep vehicles running smoothly. The company builds simple, collaborative software that helps fleets of all sizes track, analyze and improve operations. With a focus on automating the fleet operations process through telematics devices, maintenance shops and fuel cards, Fleetio’s web and mobile based technology gives access to fleet data in real-time. 

Fleetio’s Customer Experience Team serves a worldwide customer base and is always looking to improve, while aiming to reach goals that are beyond the industry standard. The customer is considered first priority and their Customer Experience Team works to ensure customers get the most out of their product. Fleetio’s team has a high sense of ownership of their offerings and they have contributed heavily to the product roadmap, strategy, and customer journey. This has resulted in creating an incredible fleet management tool that keeps customers happy and returning.

During the pandemic, their Customer Experience team has rallied to customers' side and created unique strategies on a case-by-case basis. The Fleetio Customer Experience Team understands the importance of continually learning and growing to improve oneself under difficult circumstances. While other SaaS companies operate with large Customer Experience Teams, Fleetio believes in quality over quantity. The team historically runs very lean, with 4 main specialists for 3,000 accounts, equating to 35,000+ users. Even with a smaller team, they consistently hit service goals and continue to receive positive reviews across various platforms. 

To provide customers with another outlet for problem solving, they offer an online Help Center, which includes over 360 in-depth articles that can all be found with a quick search. For those that prefer to speak to a Support Specialist, or need additional assistance, the Customer Experience Team consistently surpasses goals, with response times under the 30-minute industry average.

Since winning the Silver Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year - Computer Software, Fleetio has continued to provide excellent customer service to their clients. The Customer Support Team has successfully transitioned over to Salesforce Service Cloud, hired and trained a new team of 6 new Support Specialists, and maintained an extremely low missed call percent average. Fleetio’s customer service team continues to receive constant praise, in contrast to many other fleet management providers.

Fleetio won the Silver Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year - Computer Software in the 2022 Stevie® Awards for Sales and Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2023 competition? 

Jonckers Translation & Engineering was established in 1994 to provide innovative translation and localization solutions to international companies, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Marriott International, and Samsung.

In 2015, Stevie Award-winner Jonckers began to develop its own cloud-based, AI translation platform called WordsOnline, in order to reduce costs and translate large volumes within a small time frame. WordsOnline now combines machine translation with Jonckers’ own expert linguistic community. Their fusion of AI and human translation offers the speed of technology alongside the attention to detail of the human eye. In 2021, Jonckers then launched two innovative services via the WordsOnline platform: ‘Translate Now’ and a translation subscription service. ‘Translate Now’ is an instant ordering service that allows customers to upload the documents that need translating and pay directly online. The translation subscription service allows customers to set up a recurring monthly or yearly subscription based on the volume of words translated each month.Over the past two years, Jonckers has developed innovative workflows and solutions to help one of their clients provide top-rate customer service across several languages. They assist this client, an insurance agency, by translating their customer assistant portal queries and translating documents required for travel insurance claims. Customer assistant portals require 24/7 support, and the user submitting a query must receive an accurate response in their source language, using the terminology they used in their request. Jonckers overcame these challenges by making use of their AI-powered translation platform, WordsOnline. By ensuring there are linguists working in all time zones around the world, the insurance agency client can provide 24/7 coverage for their customer portal in all required languages. Making use of WordsOnline means their average reply rate for queries is 30 minutes.

Translation and localization are ultimately about facilitating good communication and Jonckers works to provide an excellent service to customers by coming up with original, creative solutions, that in turn improve their customer service by making it accessible to more users around the world. 

Since winning their Gold Stevie Award for Award for Innovation in Customer Service, Jonckers has announced the development of a connector between WordsOnline, and the popular web content management system, Tridion Sites, to facilitate the management of multilingual websites. Tridion users just need to click a button from their interface to send content for translating directly into WordsOnline. The connector allows Tridion users to cut down on turnaround time and project management, thereby reducing costs and time-to-market for their customers. WordsOnline works out five times faster than the traditional translation process followed in the industry, and Jonckers continues to support their clients through efficient translation processes. 

Jonckers Translation & Engineering S.A. won a Gold Stevie Award for Award for Innovation in Customer Service - All Other Industries at the 2022 Stevie® Awards for Sales and Customer Service.

Interested in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?