What a customer service award actually measures

Compono just won The Talent Tech Customer Service Award at the TIARA Talent Acquisition & Talent Tech Awards ANZ 2026. Our Customer Success and Support team, led by David Youngman, collected it at the gala dinner in June. We’re proud of it, and we want to be honest about what an award like this measures.

Plenty of companies close tickets fast. The judges gave us this one for something much harder to fake: customers who can see their own fingerprints on the product.

Support is where most HR tech quietly fails

Anyone who has bought software will recognise the pattern. The sales process is attentive. Onboarding is a webinar and a PDF. Then you’re handed to a ticket queue, and the only time anyone asks what you think is an annual NPS survey that disappears into a void.

The tools aren’t broken. The model is incomplete. Support built around ticket resolution answers the question “is the software working?” and never asks “is the customer getting the outcome they bought this for?” Those are different questions, and the gap between them is where churn lives.

What the judges saw

The TIARA judges praised our “strong, customer-centric service model that combines high satisfaction and SLA performance with a transparent, feedback-driven approach”. Behind that sentence is a fairly unglamorous machine, and it works like this.

Every new customer starts with onboarding built backwards from the reason they bought. Hiring for culture fit, reducing turnover, lifting engagement scores, cutting compliance training turnaround: whatever the goal is, the plan points at it. Every subscription customer is then offered a monthly success meeting. Part health check, part strategy session. We review how the platform is being used, capture new use cases as they emerge, answer open questions, and hear what customers want next.

Every piece of feedback from those meetings, and from support tickets, gets logged and ranked by impact and effort alongside input from every other customer. That ranking is what separates a nice-to-have mentioned once from a genuine pattern, and patterns make the roadmap.

A recent example. Multiple customers told us the candidate management screen in Compono Hire made it hard to see everything about a candidate at once. Hiring managers were flicking between tabs and losing context. Our designers rebuilt the screen from scratch: one scrollable page, every candidate detail in one place. Exactly the layout customers described when they told us what they needed.

Then we close the loop. If your feedback drives a release, you hear about it directly, not through a changelog. One customer flagged how inconvenient it was to download resumes just to read them. We shipped in-browser resume preview shortly after, and her Customer Success Manager walked her through it personally.

The honest bit about AI

Every support team is being told AI will change everything about their service. We tested that properly: Zendesk’s built-in AI, automation platforms, third-party triage tools, our own experiments. What we found is that our tickets tend to be complex rather than high-volume and simple, so general-purpose AI triage didn’t deliver much for our kind of support work.

So we use AI where it actually helps us: reviewing product release notes against our knowledge base and flagging articles that need updating, so self-service answers stay accurate. It’s a lot less exciting than an AI agent answering every ticket, and a lot more useful to our customers.

The numbers this produces

Over the past 18 months our support team has held a 98 per cent customer satisfaction score on every rated ticket, with 97 per cent achievement against all SLA response and resolution targets. On Capterra we hold 4.8 out of 5 overall, with a perfect 5.0 for customer service. One reviewer put it plainly: “Customer Support is second to none. I’ve never waited more than an hour or two for a response.”

The number we watch most closely, though, is retention. Customers stay, and they expand: revenue retention has regularly topped 100 per cent. When your product is shaped by the people using it, they tend to stick around.

The same thing we tell our customers

We bang on about people insight in our product: understanding who your people are, not just tracking what they do. Winning a customer service award for a feedback-driven model is the same idea applied to ourselves. Listen properly, then show people that what they said changed something. It works on teams, and it clearly works on customers too.

To David, Daryl and the whole Customer Success and Support team: this one is yours. And to our customers, who show up to those monthly meetings and tell us the truth: it’s yours as well.

Want to see what feedback-driven HR software feels like from the customer side?
Talk to us.