Customer Experience Recognition Awards

The 2014 CERA Winners | Photo courtesy of Content Rules Inc.

Do you offer great customer service?

As more and more organizations of all sizes and across all industries recognize the importance of content in supporting business relationships with customers, content producers face tremendous challenges and opportunities, that they are meeting in all sorts of innovative ways. The Customer Experience Recognition Awards (CERAs) recognize outstanding contributions to the customer experience made by content developers.

Developed in conjunction with Information Development World, the CERAs recognition ceremony takes place at a special luncheon on October 1, during the iDW conference. First, we need to collect the best content-driven customer experience initiatives. Then we’ll have some of the leading experts in customer experience, technical communications, content marketing, accessibility, localization, product management, and content strategy review the projects to determine which ones are worthy of receiving a CERA.

We invite you to nominate and submit an entry online between 9 am (ET) May 11, 2015 and 5 pm August 29, 2015 in one of the following categories: Accessibility, Customer Support – Technical Communications, Employee Engagement, Information Discovery, Translation/Localization and User Community / Social Media.

As we embark on the 2015 CERAs, we will share additional information on judges, advice on submissions, and details of the recognition ceremony. Sign-up for updates here. We hope you’ll join us.

Al Martine presents the awards ceremony with realtime captions on a large screen

Realtime captions at CERA

At last year’s event, 121 Captions demonstrated the benchmark for good accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing customers. 121 Captions was a sponsor of the Information Development World 2014 conference in Silicon Valley and we had a booth to showcase our captioning services. Tina was a judge at the Customer Experience Recognition Awards so she attended, and we provided realtime captions (CART) for the event. CART is Communication Access Realtime Translation, captions produced in realtime by a stenographer. This event was in Silicon Valley, and we had booked one of our CART writers in Kansas. She simply phoned into a laptop at the venue, which had been set up next to the presenter’s microphone, and listened to the speeches. As she wrote, the captions streamed over the internet and showed up on the large screen in less than 1 second.

There were tablets and iPads set up on the tables, and the realtime captions were streamed to these at the same time as on the big screen. We are so proud to have the fastest multi channel realtime captions streaming platform available today. Access which is almost instant means real inclusion for deaf people, which equates to great customer service!

iPad screenshot of realtime captions

Providing the best quality realtime captions meant we could really drive home the point that good customer service is easy to do – in this case, making an event accessible to hard of hearing and deaf delegates. There were some deaf delegates in the audience who had not, prior to the event, disclosed their hearing loss, and they were delighted to have full access. They had never seen realtime captions before. The feedback from the delegates on Twitter showed that even those who could hear, were able to appreciate having realtime captions. Captioning is not only for those with a hearing loss, it is useful for hearing people too.