Manage Customer Experiences to Control Costs While Capturing Consumer Delight
1 Nov, 2004
By: Brian Huff,Greg Anderson,Ted LubowskyIn today’s hotly contested markets, you have to keep your customers satisfied or you’ll lose them to the competition. However, business pressures also make it essential to rigorously control the cost of achieving customer satisfaction. That’s why contact center managers often find themselves struggling with the trade-offs between cost control and optimization of the customer experience.
But two market leaders, Kodak and NCsoft, have found that it’s possible to rack up big cost savings while still raising the service quality bar. And they’re using RightNow’s customer experience management solutions to do it.
Kodak’s Voice-and-Web Automation Strategy Pays Off
Kodak is one of the world’s great brands, with a solid reputation for reliability and customer satisfaction. Kodak is also committed to leadership in the digital photography market. That’s why it’s very important for the company to optimize the customer’s quality of experience with Kodak EasyShare Gallery, an online service for managing, protecting and sharing digital pictures — as well as ordering prints and specialty photo products.
Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. As digital cameras became increasingly popular and more customers visited the site, Kodak became less able to respond to customer calls with its customary speed and accuracy. The problem became more pronounced during spikes in call volume, especially those that occurred during the holiday season. And those spikes were driving up costs. So Kodak had to take steps to improve the scalability and efficiency of its contact center.
Those steps included implementing RightNow Voice — along with the deployment of on-demand call center and routing technology from Echopass and engagement with a domestic outsourced call center — which gave Kodak the ability to automatically answer a wide range of customer calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This automation quickly reduced contact center workloads, saving the company money and ensuring its ability to deliver a superior customer experience any time of the day or night. As a result, Kodak can continue profitably growing its online business while protecting its worldwide brand.
“RightNow Voice has become an indispensable component of our total contact center environment,” said John Allum-Poon, director of customer support for Kodak EasyShare Gallery. “We have significantly reduced the number of customer calls our outsourcer’s agents have to handle and can answer many types of questions around the clock without adding a third shift.”
Automated Voice Capabilities Drive Savings and Improve Service
RightNow Voice supports Kodak’s customer service objectives with a variety of useful capabilities. All customer service calls first come into RightNow Voice and are then passed on either to the appropriate voice self-service applications or to the Echopass call-routing system.
The voice-enabled self-service knowledge base, for example, lets customers find answers to their most common questions by speaking their answers to a series of automated questions and/or using their phone’s touch-tone keypad. This allows Kodak to provide prompt service any time of the day or night with no labor cost.
RightNow Voice also integrates with a Sybase database to provide customers with answers about their own individual accounts. Because roughly 35 percent of the company’s overall call volume comes from customers checking on the status of an order, RightNow Voice provides a quick and easy means for customers to access this information. Customers simply speak or punch in appropriate numbers or answers as prompted and are able to determine their order status, again avoiding more costly support channels.
At the same time, RightNow Voice provides Kodak with the reporting it needs to better understand the needs and behaviors of its customers. For example, if the system indicates customers are asking repetitive questions about ordering products online, Allum-Poon and his staff can re-evaluate the design of the corresponding Web pages and make any necessary changes.
As of January 2006, this fully automated system was handling 21,000 calls per month for Kodak — significantly reducing its call center workload.
Just as important, RightNow Voice provides all these capabilities as an ondemand application, which means Kodak does not have to allocate capital or IT staff to ownership of the software and additional supporting IT infrastructure.
“RightNow Voice is very easy for customers to use and integrates very well with our other business systems,” said Allum-Poon. “And it keeps answering more and more calls for us as we refine and expand our implementation.”
A Holistic Contact Center Optimization Strategy
Kodak made two other significant moves in conjunction with its implementation of RightNow Voice. One was the deployment of an on-demand call-routing solution from Echopass. As with RightNow, Echopass enables Kodak to reap the business benefits of deploying technology without taking on any of the associated ownership burdens. Echopass hosts and manages the switching environment for Kodak, which simply has to provide instructions about its business rules for call routing. Callers can be transparently routed either to Kodak or to Kodak’s outsourcing partner, depending on their needs. Kodak doesn’t have to babysit hardware, administer software patches or perform any other maintenance on the system.
“Echopass gives us the benefit of an advanced call center infrastructure solution without any of the hassles,” explained Allum-Poon. “Plus, because they already had a close working relationship with RightNow, we didn’t have to worry about any snags in the implementation.”
In fact, it took RightNow and Echopass just two months to get Kodak’s system up and running. This was, in part, because of the relationship between RightNow and Echopass and the fact that RightNow is a pre-integrated partner in the Echopass EchoSystem™. “The whole project went as planned, despite the fact that there were many milestones along the way that could have delayed us had they not been completed on time,” recalled Allum-Poon.
The other key decision Kodak made was to outsource its front-line contact center staff to a U.S. partner. This eliminated the problems Kodak had historically faced in hiring temporary workers to handle periods of peak volume. Allum-Poon found these temporary hires did not fully absorb all the information presented to them in training and — since they were not actually Kodak employees — they didn’t always perform at the level required to support the Kodak brand.
Kodak’s outsourcing partner, on the other hand, manages contact center staff as its core business. It also has a strong financial incentive to fulfill Kodak’s needs and keep its business.
“Equipping and motivating contact center agents to handle temporary assignments is a specialized skill we don’t have to develop, since there are plenty of companies that can provide it as a turnkey service,” observed Allum-Poon. “Plus, we now have much more flexibility to dynamically add or reduce capacity as dictated by the needs of the business.”
A Strong Foundation for Profitable Growth
Allum-Poon emphasized the importance of developing knowledge base content that’s closely aligned with customers’ needs. “The most sophisticated contact center technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the answers to your customers’ most common questions,” he noted. “So you have to be very smart about getting the right information from subject-matter experts across your company and feeding it into your self-service systems.”
Kodak also benefits from the fact that it uses RightNow’s customer service solutions to handle its e-mail and Web selfservice channels. This ensures consistency of information across all channels and enables Kodak to manage all of its knowledge in just one place.
In addition to meeting its immediate needs, the combination of RightNow, Echopass and outsourcing has positioned Kodak EasyShare Gallery well for continued profitable growth. The company will be able to handle more customers without increased spending on call center staff — and will be able to scale its call capacity without having to worry about server hardware and network bandwidth.
“When you engage with on-demand technology providers, you really relieve yourself of a lot of management burdens,” said Allum-Poon. “RightNow and Echopass are doing a great job of managing our contact center infrastructure, so we can concentrate on our core business — which is delivering superlative photography- related goods and services to a buying public that has trusted the Kodak name for generations.”
Global Self-Service Saves NCsoft a Cool Million
Electronic gaming is another tough, competitive market. To succeed, you have to deliver great product, keep your customers happy and watch your costs. And RightNow is helping NCsoft — which has seen its North American customer base grow from 10,000 to more than 300,000 since 2001 — do all three.
RightNow’s main impact on NCsoft has been in the area of customer satisfaction. NCsoft focuses completely on online gaming — unlike most companies in the business, which specialize in device- based games and only offer online titles as a secondary business. Consequently, superb online support is essential for optimizing customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.
RightNow’s Web self-service and e-mail management functionality are obviously of tremendous value to NCsoft in this regard. Using NCsoft’s RightNow-powered knowledge bases, gamers can quickly look up answers to their most common questions without interrupting their online gaming experience. NCsoft has enhanced the effectiveness of its knowledge bases by providing many “answers” in the form of screen shots that are easy for gamers to understand. Plus, with answers available in English, French, German, Italian, Korean and Spanish, gamers around the world can get the same immediate online support in their native languages.
In fact, by automatically answering customers’ questions via the Web, NCsoft has estimated savings of more than $1 million annually. And that savings is projected to rise significantly as the company’s business continues to grow.
NCsoft has also integrated RightNow into the games themselves, so gamers can submit questions directly from within their active gaming sessions. These messages automatically capture a variety of information about where the gamer is and what they’re doing, so NCsoft staff can more quickly and effectively answer their questions.
And while gamers are generally directed to ask their questions online, RightNow enables NCsoft to make phone support a seamless component of its overall customer service environment. So regardless of how a customer asks a question, the NCsoft staffer providing the answer can see the customer’s entire interaction history on a single screen.
“RightNow is an extremely effective solution for getting information to customers where, when and how they need it,” said NCsoft Director of Studio Services John Erskine. “Regardless of what game they play, what language they speak or what communication channel they use, RightNow enables us to answer our customers’ questions quickly and accurately.”
Optimizing the Productivity of a Global Support Team
In addition to ensuring that NCsoft’s customers get the kind of help they need to keep them happy and loyal, RightNow also maximizes the productivity of the company’s global customer support team. It does this in several ways. By offloading customers’ most common and repetitive questions, for example, RightNow allows the team to focus on issues that truly require their personal attention and expertise. In addition, because NCsoft’s staff can see each customer’s complete support history on their RightNow desktops, they don’t have to ask the same questions over and over — and they can avoid suggesting a solution that has already been tried and not worked.
RightNow also makes it easy for customer service agents to delete redundant or expired incidents from the work queue. “When customers get frustrated, they sometimes unleash a barrage of support requests that all look like separate incidents,” explained Erskine. “With RightNow, our agents can clear those incidents once they’ve helped the customer and ascertained that no further support activity is required.”
In addition, RightNow links NCsoft staff around the world, so they can easily route incidents to each other as appropriate.
So if a customer from the U.S. accidentally goes to the company’s European Web site to ask a question, that incident can be easily routed back to a North American support center.
RightNow has proven to be such an intuitive and flexible communication management solution that NCsoft is using it for a full range of customer-facing business processes, including technical support, billing and administration issues, contest participation and bug reports.
RightNow’s on-demand delivery model is particularly useful for a company like NCsoft with locations around the world. With a Web-based, on-demand system, agents in every location can share a common computing environment without all of the complex infrastructure typically required to distribute an internally deployed application on a global basis. This allows NCsoft to avoid both capital costs and ongoing technology management expenses.
The on-demand model also eliminates the costs and headaches associated with ownership of the software itself. “RightNow manages hundreds of implementations of its software, so it can do things like execute an upgrade much more quickly and effectively than we could if we had to do it on our own,” noted Erskine. “The result is that we gain all the business benefits of their technology without many of the hassles.”
