NEW YORK, NY.- LiveAuctioneers has won a prestigious Stevie® Award in the 2017 International Business AwardsSM (IBAs) competition, in the "Customer Service Team of the Year" category.

Nicknamed the “Stevies” for the Greek word meaning “crowned,” the awards will be presented to winners at a gala awards banquet at the W Hotel in Barcelona, Spain on October 21.

More than 3,900 nominations from organizations in 60+ nations or territories were submitted to this year’s IBAs. Stevie® Award winners were determined by the average scores of more than 200 executives worldwide who participated on 12 juries. The stellar panel that adjudicated the Customer Service of the Year category included executives from such global powerhouses as Oracle Corporation, Barclaycard, ADP, Dubai Airport Freezone, and WP Engine, among others.

“Customer service is the cornerstone of LiveAuctioneers’ business,” said Phil Michaelson, LiveAuctioneers Senior VP Marketing and Product. “Most companies view customer service as an expense, but we view it as a smart marketing investment with a rapid payback that provides a multi-year return to our business, our auction-house partners and our bidder community. While auction houses on the LiveAuctioneers platform see a 23% increase in auction revenue once they join LiveAuctioneers, it is the tools we provide to help them win consignors – from multilingual support to best-practice sharing – that enable auction houses on our platform to win consignments more regularly than auction houses than are not on our platform.’

“No matter how superior a product or service may be, it’s only as effective as the support team that ensures partners get all the benefits of working with a global leader,” Michaelson continued. “Our focus on hiring customer support professionals with empathy, ensuring multilingual support for buyers and sellers, and a highly data-centric approach to measuring our support effectiveness all contributed to LiveAuctioneers’ recognition by a highly respected group of industry leaders.”

Judges noted in their commentary that LiveAuctioneers delivers “excellent customer service … with high integrity, making a real difference to the business and community,” and remarked that the company’s proficient onboarding and training of 972 new auction-house partners over the past year was “a great example of owning a critical client journey.” Statistics showed that LiveAuctioneers’ support team had maintained an exceptional 99.98% retention rate with existing clients and that customer satisfaction had increased by 45%, putting LiveAuctioneers comfortably ahead of its competitors in the online-auction space.

“The IBA judges from across the world were highly impressed with the nominations they reviewed this year,” said Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards. “The Stevie Awards are proud to honor organizations that demonstrate a high level of achievement in a variety of industries. We look forward to sharing many of these stories with people around the world over the coming months through the Stevie Awards blog and social media channels, with the hope to inspire others to high achievement.”