UniFirst Wins Customer Service Award
UniFirst Corp., Wilmington, MA, recently was presented with a Bronze Stevie® Award in the Back-Office Customer Service Team of the Year category at the 10th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, according to a news release. The awards were presented to honorees during a gala banquet on March 4 at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino. More than 500 executives from the U.S. and several other nations attended.
UniFirst’s customer service and contact center team is located within the company’s distribution center in Owensboro, KY. UniFirst’s bronze-winning nomination centered on the creation and implementation of new professional development tools, performance measurement metrics and performance review programs to identify areas for continuous improvement in all aspects of customer service.
“We wanted to ensure that the customer service representatives on our team possess the highest levels of professional caliber polish and skillset,” said Bethany Johnson, UniFirst’s customer service manager. “We felt a responsibility to help them reach those levels, for their benefit and for our customers’ benefit. We were confident they had the ability but wanted to make sure we were doing everything we could to properly equip them to consistently deliver excellence in customer relations.”
Johnson’s group identified a need to further enhance an environment that supports the professional growth and success of their customer service representatives. “It appears, based on overwhelming positive results from a new online survey tool, that our efforts are having a near immediate impact on both response rates and overall customer satisfaction. We’re extremely proud of that.”
The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service include top sales awards, business development awards, contact center awards and customer service awards. The Stevie Awards organizes several of the world’s leading business awards shows including the prestigious American Business AwardsSM and International Business AwardsSM.
Over 2,100 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Finalists were determined by the average scores of 115 professionals worldwide, acting as preliminary judges. More than 60 members of several specialized judging committees determined the Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Award placements from among the finalists during final judging earlier this month.
Details about the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service and the list of Stevie winners in all categories are available at www.stevieawards.com/sales.