(Cary, N.C.) SciQuest, Inc., a leading provider of on-demand strategic procurement and supplier enablement solutions, today announced the company’s customer support department was selected as a finalist in the 8th annual American Business AwardsSM (The Stevie® Awards), the nation’s premier business awards program. Stevie Award winners will be announced at the awards banquet in New York on Monday, June 21.

SciQuest was selected for a number of initiatives it developed in 2009 to improve customer communication and service. With these initiatives, customer support, under the leadership of Jeff Woody, director of customer support, reduced the number of incidents per customer by 25 percent and accelerated the time-to-resolve incidents by 20 percent. Additionally, SciQuest received a 98.5 percent satisfaction rating on its 2009 annual customer survey.

“It reveals a great deal about our culture to see our employees working to constantly improve an already enviable track record of achieving exceptional customer satisfaction rankings and renewal rates,” said Stephen Wiehe, president and CEO of SciQuest. “Customer commitment and satisfaction is at the foundation of everything we do and is a key reason for our growth as a provider of solutions offered in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). At SciQuest, we believe it is the second ‘S’ in SaaS, service, that defines success.”

SciQuest’s customers include many of the world’s leading organizations from the education, government, healthcare and life sciences industries. Using the company’s procurement automation and supplier enablement solutions, SciQuest customers are able to gain real-time visibility into spending, aggregate their buying power and eliminate time-consuming and costly tasks traditionally associated with the purchasing process.

“SciQuest achieved a high score from the judges for the results they achieved through their customer service programs,” said Michael Gallagher, president of The Stevie Awards. “The Stevie Awards have become America’s most distinguished award programs so this is no small achievement. We congratulate this year’s finalists for their hard work and innovative ideas and solutions.”

SciQuest 2009 customer service initiatives included:

* The ideas forum, an online forum whereby customers can request features for upcoming product releases, enabling them to influence product development from the start. Through a voting process, SciQuest creates a Top 10 list of customer-requested features for review prior to making development decisions.
* The buddy system, a system whereby each product development professional is assigned a customer support representative. This ensures that customers’ points of view and unique issues are considered throughout the design and development process.
* Pre-release training, where SciQuest conducts three product releases each year and communicates the release schedules to customers a year or more in advance. To ensure these releases are successfully deployed, SciQuest established a process by which detailed outreach begins at least 60 days in advance of each product release. The team also holds at least two preview webinars to detail new functionality at a high level, and has additional webinars to delve into each product feature.
* Kaizen events — regularly scheduled events that gather stakeholders from throughout the company—from professional services to quality assurance—to analyze where SciQuest has been successful, conduct root cause analysis for support issues, and identify areas to improve operations. Through these events, customer support fosters a customer-oriented culture where everyone is empowered to solve problems that impact customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
* Customer satisfaction surveys - three types of surveys to monitor customers. Surveys are given following each submitted support ticket and reviewed bi-weekly. Each customer is asked to complete a satisfaction survey annually, providing a long-term view of customer health. Finally, internal surveys are completed quarterly for every customer to assess usage of the company’s solutions and estimate each customer’s return on investment. If the customer is not utilizing the company’s solutions fully and the ROI is lower than expected, an internal task force is assigned to develop a plan for improvement to assist that customer.

About the Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in four programs: The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about The Stevie Awards at www.stevieawards.com.

SciQuest provides a leading on-demand strategic procurement and supplier enablement solution that integrates customers with their suppliers to improve procurement of indirect goods and services. Our on-demand software enables organizations to realize the benefits of strategic procurement by identifying and establishing contracts with preferred suppliers, driving spend to those contracts and promoting process efficiencies through electronic transactions. Using our managed SciQuest Supplier Network, our customers do business with more than 30,000 unique suppliers and spend billions of dollars annually.

Our current target markets are higher education, life sciences, healthcare and state and local governments. We tailor our solution for each of the vertical markets we serve by offering industry-specific functionality, content and supplier connections. We serve more than 160 customers operating in 16 countries and offer our solution in five languages and 22 currencies.

For more information about SciQuest, please visit www.sciQuest.com or call 877-710-0413 in the U.S. or +44 1794 341182 in Europe.