British Airways Depends on RightNow to Serve Millions of Customers During Industrial Action Crisis
Slough, U.K., February 22, 2006
RightNow Technologies hosted more than 4.1 million customer service interactions* for ba.com during the disruptions caused by the August industrial action last year. Neither British Airways nor RightNow had prior warning of the disruptions that would lead to a huge usage spike concentrated across a three-day period. Overnight customer interactions rose from a daily average of around 80,000 to more than 735,000 – eight times the usual demand. As a result the usual monthly average of 2.1 million interactions doubled as customers sought guidance online. RightNow’s robust hosting facility proved to be reliable, immediately scaling to meet customer needs.
As soon as British Airways realised flights were going to be disrupted it acted to make the latest news and information easily available to customers via RightNow Service™ on its ba.com web site. It directed customers to the site with call queue messages, relieving some of the pressure at a time when the call centres were under unprecedented demand.
A British Airways team monitored flight status round-the-clock and used RightNow Service’s intelligent knowledge base to publish updated information to the web. With no British Airways flights arriving or departing from Heathrow it was imperative for customers that the correct information and flight status was communicated at all times.
“We’ve been working with RightNow since 2001 and, even though they handle millions of service interactions for us each month, the system has never been under the type of demand we saw in August,” Chris Carmichael, technology exploitation manager, at British Airways, said. “We had no way of planning for this; we didn’t know if everything would run smoothly or how heavy the volume of traffic would be. It was only a few days after the height of the action that we actually realised how seamlessly RightNow had handled the huge spike in demand. The strength is that this wasn’t an issue for us at all, it’s a very compelling argument for RightNow’s approach to on demand applications.”
ba.com first implemented RightNow as part of its customer enabled- strategy. British Airways uses RightNow Service to help it proactively communicate and serve customers via the web. Since its inception, customer usage of the RightNow system has grown steadily and their willingness to use British Airways’s online communication channel during the industrial action suggests it meets with their approval.
“When an event occurs to disrupt ‘business as usual’ the last thing you need to worry about is whether mission critical applications will fall over under duress,” Wayne Foncette, RightNow’s UK and Ireland vice president, said. “Our multi-version and multi-tenant hosting architecture invisibly took the brunt of the traffic meaning British Airways’s own systems remained unaffected by the load. I’m pleased to say this is another example of RightNow’s proven track record in providing enterprise-class software functionality and a robust hosting environment capable of supporting large-scale mission-critical implementations.”
*A customer service interaction is defined as a search for information in an online knowledge base, submission of questions via a web form or email, and/or interaction with a service agent through live chat or telephone.
About RightNow Technologies
RightNow (NASDAQ: RNOW) delivers the high-impact technology solutions and services organizations need to cost-efficiently deliver a consistently superior customer experience across their frontline service, sales and marketing touch-points. Approximately 1,800 corporations and government agencies worldwide depend on RightNow to achieve their strategic objectives and better meet the needs of those they serve. RightNow is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. For more information, please visit http://www.rightnow.com/.
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Greg Gianforte