Customer Happiness Awards Winner 2018: FreshBooks

FreshBooks Story

Please briefly
introduce your
company

FreshBooks is the number 1 invoicing and accounting solution for freelancers and small business owners.

Based in Toronto Canada, our vision is a world where small service-based business owners can successfully run their business without having to learn accounting.

What role does customer support have in
your company?

Customer support is the heart and soul of FreshBooks. Located in the middle of the office, our support team is dedicated to providing top-quality service for our customers by consistently going above and beyond.

Not only do we strive to help with any issues our users call or e-mail us about in record-time, we also have a huge responsibility in relaying our customers’ voice to our product and development teams based on those interactions. This ultimately allows our users to have a significant impact on our overall product and direction.

What does
customer
happiness mean
to you?

A smooth and effortless experience using our product and getting in touch with our Support team defines customer happiness for our organization. It means the world to us that our customers are getting what they want out of the product and it is of equal importance that we’re easy to reach if there’s something they need help with.

You can’t have a successful product or business without happy customers. Naturally, we also integrate customer happiness into how we evaluate our support performance. It’s not only about numbers and efficiency, but also about how our customers felt in their experience with us.

What would you advise other companies to
do to achieve the same success as you did?

I would advise other companies to try working the customer into how they evaluate their support. With a tool like Nicereply, it’s easy to take customer data and make it a metric for success.

Additionally, we’ve achieved success through developing a series of customer-centric and easily digestible values that serve as a mantra for support. Post them up so they’re visible throughout the department. Living by these values in day-to-day work will ensure that the customer and their satisfaction is always top-of-mind.

Center support evaluations and coaching around the question: “If I were a customer, how happy would I be with this experience”?

How did Nicereply
help you?

Nicereply gives us the data and metrics we need to include the customer when evaluating our support.

It is extremely valuable to be able to give praise for an incredible interaction and constructive advice for interactions that may have not landed as well, and a sure-fire way to grow a department that has a genuine passion for helping people.

What was the biggest challenge you had to
face this year?

As a company, we introduced an entirely new platform and were challenged with the task of migrating our current users from our existing platform to the other.

From a support perspective, this meant trickier conversations with customers who are change-adverse. Throughout this challenging period of platform migration, Nicereply has been a great help in collecting feedback on our customers’ experience with our support work and within the new product.

Best agents

Place	Agents name	Avg. score
1.	Nick Lapiccirella	9.71
2.	Kelsey Bhatia	9.77
3.	Colin Hutzan	9.65
4.	Bridey Dion	9.67
5.	Rachel Guloien	9.58

Customer thoughts

Excellent support! So happy I moved over to your platform! Excellent support!

You guys are simply the best at everything. Fresh Books makes my life so much easier when it comes to billing my customers. Actually it’s fun to sit on the iPad and bang out invoices. I used to dread this in the past.

Professionalism, knowledge of product and something your reps always pull off: authentic friendliness/helpfulness. these traits can't be faked - you are hiring the right people and training them well. Keep up the great work!

Your customer service is second to none! It's always a exceptional experience! Thank you!Your customer service is second to none! It's always a exceptional experience! Thank you!

Someone who knew the product and could answer my questions directly picked up the phone before the first ring finished. Apple, Bell and Rogers should outsource all of their support to FreshBooks. They would have a lot of happy customers on their hands.