These are the winners of the Customer Relations Award 2021

The Customer Relations Award has now been awarding prizes for 13 years for projects relating to the design of sustainable customer relationships in the digital age. This year, twelve projects were nominated in the four categories "Customer Focus", "Customer Experience", "Employee Focus" and "Innovation". On Thursday, the four winning projects were announced at a hybrid event at Kosmos Zurich.

Three expert talks rounded out the awards program. Meike Tarabori, Editor-in-Chief of Cmm360.ch and organizer of the Customer Relations Award, led the program.

Finally, the 2021 winners celebrated together with colleagues, jurors, sponsors and fans of sustainable customer relations at a flying dinner at Kosmos Zurich.

SVA Aargau wins in the Customer Focus category

With its vision of being the leading service provider in the field of social security throughout Switzerland, SVA Aargau was able to convince the 15 jurors and receive the award in the Customer Focus category.

The services offered by the SVA cover ten areas: AHV, IV, loss of earnings compensation, premium reduction, maternity compensation, family allowances and others. In order to be able to fulfill the service promise "We secure existence - personally, quickly and effectively", the SVA Aargau places the customer at the center of its actions.
Until now, customers had to contact each individual service area separately when they had a concern, because the internal customer service structures did not comprehensively support an effective and positive customer experience. SVA Aargau therefore set itself the challenge of how to make contact easy for customers while offering advice from a single source.

By combining all consulting competencies and services in one room, a first attempt was made to make this possible. Since there is no comparable advisory center in the 1st pillar, SVA Aargau decided to create a learning environment in the form of a lab to find out, together with customers and co-designers, what the future comprehensive customer advisory service should look like.

Swiss Post wins in the Customer Experience category

With its project "Video support via smartphone as a digital bridge between customers and support staff", Swiss Post won in the Customer Experience category.

"Swiss Post's solution provides customers with a support experience that not only satisfies, but delights. Customers can handle service concerns quickly, efficiently and personally during a phone call," the jury said.

The solution enables support staff to carry out an uncomplicated visual assessment directly via the customer's smartphone camera. On the customer's side, all that is needed is a click of approval, and the Video support via smartphone in use.

In addition to live video, useful features such as photo function, live chat with translation, a cursor with pointing function, location detection, geo-SMS and automatic service reports support. The solution complies with all data protection requirements and requires no app, software installation or login. The adoption rate among business customers is very high at over 90 %. This means that virtually all customers can be served immediately on their smartphone during an ongoing call, and claims or support processes can be handled simply at the first customer contact. This eliminates unnecessary and expensive on-site visits.

Trumpf triumphs in the innovation category

Convincing customers with innovative solutions is Trumpf's trump card - and it was with this that the project also scored points with the judges in the Innovation category.

The company offers its customers networked production technology of the latest generation. As state-of-the-art as the machines were, the customer service was analog. Malfunctions on the equipment had to be recorded manually. This is exactly where problems arose in the past: Malfunctions were reported by phone, mail or to the "wrong" technician. The technicians wanted to provide top service, but were prevented from doing their job by misunderstandings. Disturbing background noise, unclear error codes or incomplete messages led to extra work. So Trumpf implemented without further ado A service app. The app is unique in the industry and is popular. More than a third of all faults are now reported simply, quickly and intuitively via the app. A clear win-win situation: more transparency for customers and more efficiency for technicians.

Callpoint secures victory in the Employee Focus category

With its "Smile Initiative" as a new performance management tool, Callpoint came out on top in the Employee Focus category and won the award.

Until now, employee assessment was based exclusively on the achievement of key figures. Samuel Ryter, CHRO, and Michael Jeger, COO, initiated a new performance management with Smile, based on sense-making, commitment and enthusiasm.

Smile has significantly increased employee satisfaction and substantially reduced staff turnover, recruitment costs and absences due to illness. Thanks to the increased emotional loyalty of the employees, it was also possible to achieve that a very large number of existing and former employees recommend Callpoint as an attractive employer, which has a very positive influence on the number of incoming job applications.

Best Newcomer and Best Talent excellent

This year, Kim Arn from AXA was named Best Newcomer with the best overall report card in the 2021 Customer Dialog training program.

Ivonne Eng from the Basler Kantonalbank has the best overall certificate among the contact center supervisors with a federal certificate. Peter Peterlechner, head of education at Customer Connection, wished the young talent a successful career in the contact center industry. The presentation of the certificate, which was recorded in advance, was recorded on video at the award ceremony and shared with the guests on site at Kosmos.

m&k Werbewoche.ch is the official media partner of the Customer Relation Award.