With nearly 100 awards collected since our inception 20 years ago, we’ve made a habit of winning awards for the work we do in supporting small businesses with their business essentials.
Even by our own high standards, 2021 was a remarkable year for awards at XLN. We won 8 in total, including our first global prizes. And best of all, those wins all came out of some of the most challenging times for our business, and our customers.
We’re really proud of what was a record-breaking year.
A golden year
We picked up three awards at the UK Business Awards 2021, which proudly included the overall winner award.
Later in the year, we picked up a further three gongs at the International Business Excellence Awards, our first global prizes and further recognition for our efforts during the pandemic.
And along the way, we also secured awards at the UK Customer Experience Awards.
They’re all customer-centric awards – and in most cases, we beat rivals far bigger than our own business. That’s what made 2021 such a humbling experience – and it’s all down to the incredible efforts of our various support and service teams.
A story of overcoming adversity
Like most great stories, the narrative that helped us to convince judges all over the world was built around how we overcame challenges to succeed in what has been a turbulent period.
The pandemic affected small businesses disproportionately. As is always the case, they’ve faced the harshest consequences of a global crisis.
But the response of our service, support teams, managers and senior leaders was instrumental in helping them survive – which in turn has led to more success at XLN.
It was the response that blended fast-thinking innovation with serious hard work. We moved an entirely office-based call response infrastructure remotely in a matter of weeks, and there was barely an interruption in service. In fact, our customer service ratings, which have always been sky-high, didn’t drop a single point.
That’s miraculous. And the specifics of how we managed it as a business were rightly acknowledged through these award wins.
But perhaps even more importantly, we re-connected with our mission as a business during the pandemic. We’re here to help small businesses survive and thrive – and we’re proud to say that we truly did everything in our power to continue that mission at a time when it was most challenging.
Onwards to more success
We move into 2022 in a strong position as a business, and this year we’ll have new stories to share at awards entries around the world.
So watch this space – we’ve only just begun.
