Earlier today, it was announced that Coveo was selected as a Finalist in the 14th annual Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. I sat down with Juanita Olguin (Senior Product Marketing Manager for Service) to find out more about this award and what it means for Coveo. 

Before I begin, the team at Coveo would also like to take the opportunity to congratulate our customer Vizio for being named as a Finalist in various categories. Kudos to you, Vizio! 

What are the Stevie® Awards for Sales and Customer Service? 

The Stevie® Awards for Sales and Customer Service are “the world’s top honors for customer service, contact center, business development, and sales professionals.” These awards represent just one of eight Stevie® Award programs, and this is the 14th year that this specific program has been run. 

Each year, thousands of nominations from numerous nations across the globe come in from organizations hoping for a chance to be recognized for their excellence in the workplace. These organizations are characterized by a wide range of industries and sizes, making it challenging to maintain a competitive edge. 

What did the evaluation process look like? 

The initial nomination involved a long-form essay describing Coveo’s accomplishments in the past 18 months, along with the inclusion of supporting materials that provided greater detail about significant moments. That time period was a very busy and exciting time for Coveo- leaving us with an exciting story to share. 

Those 18 months started with Coveo being named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines in 2018, and continued with several spectacular cases of customer success, being named a leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Cognitive Search in Q2 of 2019, and the launch of our ServiceNow solution. This story ended full-circle with Coveo being named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines again in 2019 and the exciting news of our $1 billion valuation. 

This year, 2,600 nominations were submitted from organizations in 48 nations worldwide, each telling  their own success story. Those nominations were reviewed by 180 professionals, with Finalists in each category being determined by the average scores of those individuals. 

In what category was Coveo named a finalist? What differentiated Coveo from its competitors in this space?

Coveo was named as a Finalist for “Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year.”

Coveo’s robust Experience Intelligence Platform (EIP) is really what sets us apart in terms of our capabilities and what we can provide to our customers. Using our EIP, customers are able to unify data across the enterprise into a single index, apply artificial intelligence & machine learning to make sense of data points, and, as a result, offer an intelligent experience to customers and agents by surfacing the most relevant information to address the task at hand. Coveo is effectively providing hyper-personalized experiences for key stakeholders, no matter where they are or what system they are using. This has the potential to significantly reduce case volumes through case deflection and to drive agent productivity through increased agent proficiency.

Our productized integrations with a leading line of business applications (such as Salesforce and ServiceNow) enable our customers to bring the Coveo experience into their own applications and ecosystem. This means our customers can boost their computing AND people power while still maintaining full control of their own data. The best part is that our EIP operates within a multi-tenant cloud environment. This allows for a rapid deployment of updates, which benefits all customers simultaneously- no matter which integration they are using.   

What does this win mean for Coveo? 

Although many have come to the realization that AI can really transform the customer service function, adoption is difficult without strong use cases and a knowledgeable partner. To us, being named a finalist in this category proves that we can really make AI work using our EIP.  We feel this recognition reflects our ability to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning in a way that generates actionable insights for our customers so they can then create intelligent experiences for their own customers that yield significant and concrete business outcomes. 

Customer success is really what drives us as a company. Our customers’ success is how we measure our own, as it is what truly proves our ability to add value to their organization. In our eyes, being nominated as a finalist for this award serves as a testament to everything we’ve done for our customers and a powerful indication of our ability to continue to help them succeed in the future. 

What’s next? 

Coveo being named as a finalist is a big deal, but we have yet to find out our final ranking in that category. Depending on our total score from the judges, we will receive a gold, silver, or bronze placement at the awards banquet at the end of February. We are so proud of all we have achieved, and we look forward to being publicly recognized by such a notable organization along with Vizio and our other highly accomplished peers.