Rockend wins at the International Service Excellence Awards

This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.

As a testament to our commitment in providing our customers with great service experiences, we at Rockend have recently been awarded Contact Center of the Year (Medium) and Customer Service Executive of the Year (for Scott Downing- Chief Customer Officer) at the International Service Excellence Awards last January 21, 2019.

These awards are added feathers to our cap of customer service achievements, setting a world-class standard to customer service in the property management software space.

The Awards

The International Service Excellence Awards is run by the International Council of Customer Service Organizations (ICCSO), with this year’s awards managed by the Customer Service Institute of America (CSIA).   With our recognition, we join other organisations around the globe that are exemplary in providing exceptional customer service as aligned with the International Customer Service Standard (ICSS).

A culture of providing excellent customer experience

Providing our customers a great experience is what we live and breathe for.  But what goes on behind the scenes?

While strengthening relationships with real estate agencies, property, and strata management companies has long been critical for us here at Rockend, recent years have seen the whole team develop a deep focus on having the customer present in all business decisions, either literally or through data analysis.

From launching unique Net Promoter Score metrics to leveraging a comprehensive contact centre interface, we are able to turn data into action and deliver a higher quality of service.

Our Chief Customer Officer, Scott Downing, has instigated this cultural and operational business transformation since joining Rockend in 2017 and his initiatives put a  spotlight on the value of customer feedback in improving not only the customer’s experience but the business’ overall health.

“It is incredibly important for customers to feel like their voice is being heard and their feedback is presented to those who can most benefit from it,” says Mr Downing.

“Our teams can then actively workshop this rich customer feedback and, just as importantly, drive change.”

NPS as KPIs

One of Mr Downing’s most important initiatives was to change how the business measures successful customer experiences by using the power of three Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics.

The first is an Interaction NPS (iNPS) which facilitates feedback at an interaction level, like from a single phone call or a live chat. A survey is then generated from the interaction which asks the customer whether the employee was friendly, knowledgeable and empathetic, as well as if the query was resolved and whether the customer would recommend Rockend.

The second is an Episode NPS (eNPS), which evaluates and provides a unique score for different “episodes” in the customer lifecycle. Episodes are typically made up of a predefined set of interactions.

And lastly, Rockend considers a Strategic NPS (sNPS), where every single customer completes a full survey on the organisation’s performance, mapping out where Rockend is and isn’t doing well and providing a basis for change and improvement.

By breaking up the customer experience and looking at the process from an end-to-end perspective, Rockend can implement cross business improvements.

Turning data into action

Rockend has also implemented a variety of data-capture systems that are integrated with customer and employee feedback-gathering technologies – a rarity in the property sector.

Using the Qualtrics platform, all customers and employees can give feedbacks and from there, our customer service team can use the data to make key changes.  

Our Customer Insights and Improvement Manager, Linda Battin explains that this unique system “allows teams to know how they responded to customer needs, not how well we adhere to a process.”

Only once this data is produced that it can be drawn back into the larger Qualtrics system, generating richer insights.  These are then fed directly to our leaders across the entire business.

With our ‘systems thinking’ we are able to streamline unwieldy processes and create new features that gives us an edge in customer experience, changing the game once and for all to what customer service is and can be in property software.