From Growing Pains to Gold Standard: Guusto’s Customer Experience Transformation

Guusto is an employee recognition and rewards platform designed to help HR leaders create meaningful recognition programs that improve engagement, retention, and workplace culture - especially for frontline teams. Guusto enables automated recognition for milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries, as well as peer-to-peer appreciation, making recognition easy, inclusive, and impactful.

Briefly describe the nominated team: history and past performance (up to 1,250 characters):

Guusto is an employee recognition and rewards platform that helps HR leaders build programs that improve frontline engagement, retention, and workplace culture. The platform enables automated milestone recognition and peer-to-peer appreciation for organizations of all sizes.

The Customer Experience team supports this ecosystem end-to-end, assisting HR leaders administering programs and employees receiving recognition. As Guusto experienced rapid growth, the team evolved quickly - but by mid 2023, customer demand had outpaced existing processes, tools, and coverage. Customers encountered longer wait times, limited self-service options, and an experience that no longer reflected Guusto's mission to make work more fulfilling and rewarding.

Recognizing the need for change, the Customer Experience team became a strategic priority for the organization. Beginning late 2023, the team embarked on a comprehensive transformation focused on operational excellence, scalability, and customer-centric design. Investments in people, training, technology, data, and AI laid the foundation for a modern support organization built to deliver fast, high-quality, and consistent service.

This transformation repositioned Customer Experience as a core driver of customer satisfaction and business success, setting the stage for the significant performance gains achieved over the following year.

Outline the team's achievements since July 1, 2023 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 1,500 characters):

During this time, the Guusto Customer Experience team has executed a decisive, multi-dimensional transformation that fundamentally elevated the speed, quality, and scalability of customer support.

To eliminate excessive wait times, the team expanded operating hours from 9am - 5pm EST to 9am - 8pm EST, increasing coverage by 37% and aligning support more effectively with customer demand. Strategic hiring and accelerated training ensured immediate impact. In parallel, the team launched AI-powered chat support to assist customers outside business hours, successfully resolving common issues and delivering an average customer satisfaction score of 87%.

Using advanced volume and staffing analysis, the team redesigned schedules to match peak demand while protecting team wellbeing, removing structural inefficiencies that had driven unnecessary delays.

Beyond speed, the team elevated quality and long-term scalability. Recurring training and cross-skilling programs built deeper expertise and consistency. A newly established documentation initiative modernized self-service resources, driving a 30% year-over-year reduction in support contacts despite rapid customer growth. For the first time, structured case categorization generated actionable product insights, directly influencing the roadmap and further reducing support demand.

These initiatives delivered exceptional results: overall CSAT increased from 74% in 2024 to 96% in 2025 (+22%), AI chat CSAT rose from 52% to 87% (+35%), and average response time fell from 50 minutes to 4 minutes-a 92% year-over-year improvement.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 1,500 characters):

The achievements outlined are significant because they surpass not only Guusto's prior performance but also widely accepted industry standards, demonstrating a transformation that goes beyond normal expectations for customer support organizations.

Prior to July 1, 2023, our team operated within traditional support norms but lacked the responsiveness and scalability that modern customers expect. Across many industries, typical customer service teams average CSAT scores of 65-70%, with even established SaaS companies often around 68%-85% and top performers above 90%. In contrast, our CSAT rose from 74% in 2024 to 96% in 2025, placing us solidly in the exceptional performance tier.

Industry benchmarks also show that average first response times for help desks often fall in the multi-hour range, such as 6-12 hours for support desks and 1-4 hours for email responses. Our transformation reduced average response time from 50 minutes to just 4 minutes, an achievement that is not just ahead of these averages but aligns with best-in-class service expectations where responses under 5 minutes are considered excellent.

Implementing AI chat support that sustained 87% satisfaction further distinguishes us, as many organizations are still early in AI adoption and have yet to meaningfully integrate it into customer satisfaction scoring.

Moreover, while many teams struggle to reduce support volume as they scale, Guusto simultaneously expanded self-serve resources that drove a 30% reduction in contact volume despite customer base growth - an outcome that reflects strategic, data-driven improvements rather than incremental fixes.

Taken together, our achievements compare favourably to industry norms and top performers, demonstrating a transformational shift in speed, quality, and customer experience.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 1,500 characters):

The supporting materials attached to this nomination provide direct, verifiable evidence of the customer service transformation and performance improvements described, including quantitative results, visual context, and customer validation.

Guusto Presentation (PDF):

A concise overview highlighting key accomplishments of the Customer Experience team, supported by visuals that contextualize the transformation, initiatives, and outcomes referenced throughout this nomination.

Guusto Metrics Spreadsheet (Google Sheets):

A read-only Google Sheets link containing detailed performance dashboards and metric exports referenced in this submission. The data provides time-based, before-and-after validation of core KPIs, including customer satisfaction, average response time, AI chat satisfaction, and support volume trends from 2024 through 2025. These materials substantiate the reported increase in overall CSAT from 74% to 96%, the 92% reduction in average response time, and the improvement in AI chat CSAT from 52% to 87%.

Customer Testimonial Video (Youtube link):

A short video created specifically for this application, featuring HR and business leaders from organizations across North America sharing firsthand experiences with Guusto's customer support. These testimonials provide qualitative validation of the improved speed, quality, and consistency of the customer experience.

Together, these materials demonstrate that the results achieved were driven by deliberate, data-informed investments and represent a sustainable transformation in customer service performance.