Purchasing Power, LLC received a Gold and a Silver Stevie® Award in the 14th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Purchasing Power®, one of the fastest-growing voluntary benefit companies in the U.S., offers the leading employee purchase program through the convenience of payroll deductions.
The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world’s top honors for customer service, contact center, business development and sales professionals. More than 2,600 nominations from organizations in 48 nations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Winners were determined by the average scores of more than 180 professionals worldwide on seven specialized judging committees. The Stevie Awards committee specifically recognized strategies that measurably improved customer satisfaction ratings, and developed a strategic plan designed to leave a legacy, after implementation, of a new relationship between an organization and its customers.
In the “Customer Service Complaints Team of the Year” category, Purchasing Power was honored with the 2020 Gold Stevie in recognition of successfully restructuring its complaints and escalations teams. With the goal of increasing its annual NPS score by 3-4%, the Customer Experience Group created two specialized teams: (1) “Returns,” to handle defective, damaged or missing items on behalf of customers, and (2) “Brand Reputation,” to closely monitor social media platforms for any negative customer comments in order to resolve or deescalate service issues.
To facilitate this effort, the group employed third-party tools to help speed assistance with customer needs, freeing and empowering frontline call center advocates to process returns in real-time with customers on the phone, schedule day/date/hour pick-ups for damaged or defective freight items to the customer’s convenience, and offer real-time chat features for processing resolutions and updates on escalated cases.
“We are a proud customer centric organization and it’s important for us to consistently look at improving our internal processes,” said Pierre Desdunes, Purchasing Power Director of Customer Care. “When customers interact with us, we strive to keep their level of effort as low as possible. Being proactive and creating these two teams have successfully contributed to achieving the highest Net Promoter Score in the company’s history.”
In the “Best Return on Customer Service Investment” category, Purchasing Power won the 2020 Silver Stevie for implementing its first Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Project to impact the 2018 holiday shopping season. A cross-functional team of company stakeholders created an IVR interface with customers that offered (A) quick and accurate authentication of each caller; (B) immediate, easy access to self-serve the most common functions; (C) more advanced self-service response features; (D) a reduction of self-servable calls going to live call centers; and (E) a six-figure operating cost savings.
“We are so honored to be recognized for the positive results of our AI application,” said Tiffany Anderson, Director of CX Process and Initiatives for Purchasing Power. “Our focus on the customer during build out and implementation carries over into our next iterations of this Smart Action Feature.”