Does a “Stevie” Guarantee Amazing Customer Service?
The Stevies are an international business awards program that are well recognized by vendors and business-to-business publications around the world. The International Business Awards are one of several business-oriented awards programs run by the company, which charges fees to entrants as its chief strategy to making revenue.
This year, BlueJeans is being recognized with a silver award for “customer service team of the year” in the Computer Services & Software category. It was among five firms to receive the silver honor in the category. One firm, Wellington, NZ-based Xero, won the gold, and six others won a bronze award. Other firms honored with Stevie awards related to customer service this year include DHL, IBM, and Dell Technologies.
According to its judging and awards process, the Stevies recruit volunteer judges they deem qualified. The judging group for the customer service team awards is chaired by Rob Siefker, Senior Director of Customer Loyalty at Zappos.com, and the entire committee is found on the Stevie Awards website. At least five judges review each entry and score it. If an entry receives an average score of at least 7.25 out of 10, then it’s eligible to win an award. The highest score issued receives the Gold Stevie Award. Other finalists scoring at least eight out of 10 receive a Silver Stevie Award.
What’s not shared is what criteria the judges are using to come up with their scores. The entries submitted by the vendors aren’t public either. While the Stevie awards tell vendors that their claims may be audited and that there are serious repercussions for lying, we don’t know which entries undergo that extra scrutiny. We’re also not aware of all the entrants to each category that did not become finalists.
In a press release about the award, BlueJeans Chief Customer Officer Walt Weisner says, “The art of customer service is in the delivery. Our team walks side-by-side with our customers through the complete journey and it only gets better over time. From new customers to tenured users, we are hyper focused on their experience.”
Source: Web Conferencing Emotional Footprint on SoftwareReviews, Accessed August 29, 2019
Our Take
We know that other web conferencing vendors have participated in past Stevie awards programs in various categories, such as Arkadin and GoToMeeting. But we don’t know if BlueJeans came out on top over other web conferencing vendors for this specific award. Info-Tech recommends sticking to the data and using comparative user reviews to guide your decision on selecting vendors. In our SoftwareReviews.com Emotional Footprint report, customer service experience is one of the factors making up overall scores. As you can see in the report above, BlueJeans is in the “contender” area, ranking below several other vendors.