RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

Becker Professional Review Delivers An Exceptional Student Experience And Improves Business Performance With RightNow®

Goals

• Maintain leadership in competitive higher education market
• Deliver value-added services to support premium pricing
• Reduce operational costs

Achievements

• Re-allocation of staff time for pro-active follow-up boosts recruitment and retention rates
• Innovative use of solution for programs such as tutoring and CPA exam tracking provides incremental value
• 67 percent reduction in registration-related incidents
• 98 percent of student issues resolved within 24 hours

Becker Professional Review has a long history of delivering exceptional value to college students and accounting professionals. To maintain its competitive advantage, however, Becker continues to invest in differentiating capabilities—as well as in efficiency improvements that help it operate more profitably.

RightNow is helping Becker succeed on both fronts. With its innovative deployment of RightNow's hosted crm solution, Becker is delivering exceptional, value-added service to students across all communication channels, while reducing costs.

“Becker’s continued success is contingent to a large degree on our ability to provide a level of service to our students that our competitors can’t match,” said Peter Serrate, Becker’s director of central services. “RightNow provides solutions and professional services that have proven instrumental in maintaining and extending the differentiation of our brand year after year.”

Consistently Responsive Service Across All Channels

Becker has deployed RightNow to optimize its ability to provide current students, prospective students, and others with fast, accurate answers to their questions regardless of how they choose to interact with the organization. In fact, RightNow has been widely implemented across DeVry’s other business units—including DeVry University Online, Ross University, and Chamberlain College of Nursing. In this highly decentralized environment, RightNow is used by more than one thousand agents in different groups. Most units use RightNow for managing interactions with students across all communication channels—including phone, email, web self-service, and postal mail. Becker, however, has taken the additional step of integrating RightNow with its fax servers, so that a RightNow incident is automatically opened whenever a student sends a fax.

The impact of Becker’s implementation has been significant. For example, the ratio of service incidents to completed registrations used to be 3:1. Now, with RightNow’s effective web based CRM solution in place, there is on average only one service incident required per registration – a reduction of 67 percent.

Also, before implementing RightNow, Becker’s contact center staff could “cherry pick” incoming incidents and were not accountable for how quickly they resolved the issue. With RightNow, all incidents are now appropriately distributed to agents and tracked until they’re resolved. A dashboard provides everyone with a view into the contact center’s performance. As a result, Becker has been able to establish service level agreements (SLAs) and monitor its compliance with those SLAs.

One SLA, for example, specifies that 85 percent of student issues are to be resolved within 24 hours. Becker is actually exceeding that target and achieving 24-hour turnarounds 98 percent of the time.

In addition to reducing contact center costs and driving faster turnaround times, the efficiencies resulting from its RightNow implementation have enabled Becker to re-allocate staff time for pro-active follow-up contacts with students. This is helping to further boost recruitment, retention rates, and levels of student satisfaction.

“With RightNow, we can do a much better job taking care of students before, during, and after they’re enrolled in one of our units,” says Serrate. “That improved experience helps elevate our brand and generate more word-of-mouth referrals.”

Leveraging RightNow For Added Value To The Student

Becker has also implemented RightNow in a way that enhances its ability to support users of its electronic courseware. Before this implementation, those students were assigned a personal tutor. The tutor was their primary point-of-contact if they needed help with some aspect of the course they were taking. This approach was less than optimal for a few reasons. First, Becker had no visibility to the interactions between students and their tutors, so it couldn’t track how responsive the tutors were to students’ requests and it couldn’t generate reports that might highlight chronic issues requiring the attention of curriculum managers. Second, tutors had to have broad familiarity with all subjects covered in any given course. If a tutor wasn’t strong in any specific subject, the student might not get as good an answer as he or she might desire.

Becker’s solution was to incorporate course content into a RightNow knowledge base and to handle student questions via RightNow’s workflow engine. This has yielded a variety of benefits. First of all, students can often find the answers to their questions without any staff assistance whatsoever. Second, when students do need personal assistance, their request can be routed to an appropriate subject-matter expert. This ensures that students get the strongest support possible with any subject that they find particularly challenging. Third, Becker can now see exactly what topics are causing students the most confusion—so it can make appropriate improvements to its courseware. This continuously optimizes the student experience with Becker’s courseware over time, while also further driving down the number of questions that tutors have to personally handle.

Becker has taken the further step of customizing RightNow to track the four separate certification exams that students enrolled in its Certified Public Accountant (CPA) review program have taken. This information is important to the accounting firms that enroll their employees in these courses, because many require their employees to complete their certification within three years. By tracking the certification information in RightNow and making it available to training managers at these firms, Becker is enabling them to ensure that their employees fulfill their certification requirements within the allotted timeframe.
“There are a lot of things you can do with the workflow rules, database customization, and integration facilities RightNow offers,” says Serrate. “By being creative with our implementations, we have found new ways to add value for our students and streamline our business processes.”

RightNow: A Dedicated, Highly Skilled Long-Term Business Partner

According to Serrate, RightNow’s expertise and professional services have played an important role in ensuring that Becker gets maximum value out of its investment in RightNow’s hosted crm solutions. In particular, he points to a recent Strategic Alignment engagement with RightNow that resulted in a comprehensive list of recommendations that Becker (along with DeVry as a whole) is now applying to optimize its implementation.

Becker is also expanding its RightNow implementation to even further improve its business performance. The company has implemented RightNow’s sales force automation software in its call center to track the leads and ensure that every prospect receives appropriate, timely follow-up. In addition to bringing discipline and consistency to its sales processes, Becker’s expanded use of RightNow is providing the company with greater insight into conversion rates and individual employee performance.

This expansion is slated to continue with the implementation of RightNow’s marketing sales force automation—which will enable the company to improve the customer experience, increase operating efficiency, and gain high-value insight across the entire customer lifecycle.
According to Serrate, RightNow’s culture of service has also played a key role in Becker’s ongoing efforts to provide its students with a competitively differentiated experience across all touch-points.

“RightNow understands what it takes to make us and our students happy,” says Serrate. “And they’re able to translate that understanding into an ever-growing set of practical, powerful capabilities that make Becker the provider-of-choice for financial professionals seeking the certification they need to further their careers.”

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About Becker Professional Review

Becker Professional Review serves the global accounting and financial professions with innovative educational solutions that help students in college and throughout their careers. Over the past 50 years, Becker has prepared more than 300,000 students to take the CPA certification exams. Becker is a subsidiary of DeVry Inc. (NYSE: DV), which is also the parent organization of DeVry University, Ross University, and Chamberlain College of Nursing.