RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

American Express Incentive Services Improves Sales Processes And Exceeds Expectations Of Customer Base With RightNow

Goals

• Enhance customer experience—from prospect stage to long-term customer
• Identify, communicate and incorporate the company’s best sales processes into every sales executive’s arsenal
• Extend sales process capabilities beyond contact management and data collection
• Seamless replacement of traditional client/server CRM and sales solutions

Achievements

• Higher sales productivity and improved customer experience, leading to higher customer retention rates
• Identified, built, and implemented a customized sales process that improves cross-enterprise performance
• Achieve repeatable success: easy, accessible monitoring of sales progress, sales results, and best-selling steps

Increasing customer retention is the driving factor behind any rewards program. As the industry leader in developing custom programs and reward services to drive customer retention, American Express Incentive Services (AEIS) understands the importance of delivering a positive customer experience to help retain loyal customers.

AEIS recognized the potential to improve upon their strategy of delivering a positive customer experience by implementing a solution that better supported clients through the sales process. They needed a sales automation solution that would help establish and reinforce core sales processes and provide lead and sales management—while simultaneously helping to improve their customer interactions and relationships.

By selecting RightNow, AEIS was able to exceed their goals and implement a system that achieves repeatable success. The sales automation solution helps to guide salespeople through a best-practice selling process, and offers AEIS management the ability to monitor the progress of sales in real-time, have a firm understanding of sales results, and reinforce a sales process that supports a consistent, quality customer experience by avoiding mistakes, such as overlapping customer contact efforts which are often made when the sales process is not well structured.

Moving Beyond Customer Management

AEIS strives to deliver the utmost in quality to their entire customer base and reward earners —with hopes to anticipate and exceed expectations with every customer touch point. Several years ago however, AEIS realized there was a major impediment to that strategy; the systems they had in place were not able to support a high-quality customer experience during the sales process. To adequately meet their goals they needed a more sophisticated solution, one that went well beyond simple contact management by helping to guide sales through a proven, repeatable process that would support their corporate strategy

AEIS tried several different products to address their needs, including a traditional on-premise solution, which ultimately drained their internal IT resources and hardware. The system did not allow the management team to readily access sales lead data and they had a very difficult time dealing with database synchronization, making it difficult for sales people to be effective. This experience made it clear that their best option would be an on-demand solution due to their ability to provide real-time data and with minimal impact on their internal IT resources.

The management team was adamant about due diligence to avoid choosing another inflexible, difficult-to-manage system. They designated a team to research and test the on-demand solutions and were disappointed to find that most appeared to be nothing more than internet rolodexes, which simply collected and warehoused data. They knew that they needed much more—they needed a solution that would help establish and reinforce their core sales processes, provide lead management and sales management, and help to improve their customer interactions and relationships.

After an exhaustive search AEIS discovered RightNow. AEIS found that RightNow was much more than a contact management system—its Sales Process Builder alone was a unique and compelling feature that competitors lacked. According to O. John Groebl, AEIS IT project manager, “AEIS was very much in need of customized sales processes for our sales professionals to follow. When we looked at RightNow we discovered that this sales automation solution would allow us to identify and build a customized sales process, monitor sales progress, measure sales results, and refine selling steps as we needed—it didn’t force us to conform to a pre-set sales process. All of these elements ensured that we offered our client base a better experience—from prospect stage to customer management, we looked more organized, informed, and invested.”

A Whole Team Of Sales Leaders

AEIS’ deployment of RightNow was fast and easy. The company initially began with a team of 54 sales professionals who were up and running within 48 hours with little training. They were able to convert to the new system so quickly in part because the data conversion from previous systems to RightNow was seamless. Grobel has indicated that the company has not experienced any difficulty with user adoption of the RightNow software because they see it as essential for doing their job. “We have nearly 100 percent usage of the system—our sales people like it—a lot!”

Today, RightNow is such a fully integrated component in daily AEIS’ business and because of the value the product brings to the company, AEIS has nearly doubled the number of users on the system. “RightNow has enabled the entire AEIS sales department to perform like sales leaders by reinforcing the company’s best sales practices throughout the entire team,” said Grobel.

AEIS has also realized significant process improvements with RightNow that have resulted in higher sales productivity. Groebl states that, “The biggest and best part of our implementation of RightNow is that we now have a clean means of sharing sales information through a process that works.”

AEIS is also very impressed with features such as Campaign Management and Lead Management. According to Grobel, it was very important for AEIS to improve their lead management system to allow the sales force to acquire and decipher valuable lead data. RightNow has helped streamline the administration of the lead management process, but only recently have they taken full advantage of this feature. “Now that we are fully utilizing the lead management tools, our sales team can access and manage their leads, and based on the hierarchy we set up in RightNow, so can their sales managers—all in real-time. It is our only lead distribution point,” said Grobel.

The Road Ahead – Seamless API Integration

American Express Incentive Services plans to utilize their investment in RightNow even further by integrating RightNow into their quote system. In doing so, AEIS will make their data entry process flow much more easily. Previously, AEIS was using a home- grown database for quotes that was not connected to any of their other systems. “Our system was not working efficiently for us; we were entering data first into RightNow, only to then have to re-key the information into our quote management database. Now that we have invested in an on-demand quote management system, we can take advantage of RightNow’s APIs to connect the systems seamlessly.”

In doing so, AEIS hopes to be able to provide a smoother experience for their customers by avoiding mistakes that can be made with duplicate data entry points. In addition, the company hopes to allow their sales professionals to focus more on the service they provide to their customer instead of on data entry. This should also improve the accuracy of the data and provide a great deal of time savings for the company.

AEIS is looking to this project as a benchmark for future API integration projects that they are considering. AEIS sees their investment in RightNow and its ability to connect to other on-demand solutions as virtually limitless in regard to the potential benefits it can deliver to their organization.

American Express Incentive Services Homepage

About American Express Incentive Services

AEIS, a joint venture between American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. and Maritz, Inc., provides business-to-business reward solutions including stored-value cards, American Express® Gift Cheques, and a web-based reward management tool. Its products address a broad array of applications such as employee reward and recognition, sales incentives, and consumer promotions, while helping clients drive consumer and employee behaviors, build loyalty, and increase brand awareness. AEIS is headquartered in Fenton, Mo.