RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

Rightnow® Powers Customer-Centricity And Operational Efficiency At Black & Decker

Goals

• Make the entire organization more responsive to customers
• Optimize performance and efficiency of customer service across all channels
• Rapidly elevate acquired business units and outsourced contact center to corporate standards

Achievements

• Product management, manufacturing, and other departments gain rich, actionable customer insight
• Real-time feedback saves company thousands in product returns
• Estimated more than $250,000 in annual savings achieved through self-service
• Voice application pays for itself in 90 days
• Software-as-a-service enables new users anywhere to be added right away

For a company to be truly customer-centric, everyone—from product managers to the CFO—has to keep their eyes on the customer. But not everyone has the time or the opportunity to interact directly with customers on a regular basis. That’s why the world’s most customer-centric companies take full advantage of their contact centers to find out exactly what their customers want and need.

Black & Decker—the world’s largest producer of power tools and accessories—is a prime example of such a company. Using RightNow, the $6.4 billion global market leader is leveraging customer interactions with its contact center to capture rich, timely information that managers throughout the company can use to make smarter, better-informed decisions. As a result, the company is able to design better products, improve manufacturing quality, sell more effectively, and market more efficiently.

RightNow has also enabled Black & Decker to deliver a differentiated customer experience across all of its communication channels and business units, while substantially decreasing operational costs.

“Both the strength of our brand and our bottom-line business performance depend to a large degree on how well we understand and respond to our customers,” says Black & Decker consumer services manager Chuck Udzinski. “With RightNow, we are able to maximize that understanding and responsiveness—even as we continue to drive down costs.”

Responsive Service And Rich Insight Across All Communication Channels

At the core of Black & Decker’s success is its RightNow-enabled customer contact center. With RightNow, customer interactions across phone, email, and web channels are managed under a common incident management system. This streamlined system enables agents to address customer issues quickly and effectively. It also creates a single repository for all data about customer questions, complaints, and feedback.

This feedback is automatically distributed to whoever needs it. For example, Black & Decker has implemented business rules that forward incidents associated with specific products to the appropriate product manager. This real-time feedback gives product managers a daily sense of how their products are faring in the marketplace, which can be especially important when products are first released.

“If there’s a problem with a product or something that customers are really enthusiastic about, managers want to know about it as soon as possible,” says Udzinski. “With RightNow, we can effortlessly provide them with this critical information on a very timely basis.”

These real-time alerts are also extremely valuable to Black & Decker’s manufacturing teams—which can quickly detect patterns in customer complaints and take any appropriate corrective action immediately. This ensures customer satisfaction with the quality of Black & Decker’s products and enables the company to avoid the huge costs of replacing a part or recalling a product.

For example, Black & Decker received feedback that helped them discover a small, 30-cent part that wasn’t machined correctly. Had the error gone undetected it could have resulted in a lot of returns. But because of the timeliness of the feedback they were able to report on it quickly, and the engineering and manufacturing teams were able to make a running change at the plant—which Udzinski estimates saved the company thousands in returned products.
Similar information is made available to marketing and sales via periodic reports. The customized business rules even alert Black & Decker’s legal department if a product liability issue emerges during a customer call.

"RightNow has dramatically enhanced both our internal processes and the ways in which we interact with the rest of the business," declares Black & Decker consumer services manager Chuck Udzinski. "As a result, we are improving the ability of the company as a whole to respond to our customers even as we reduce costs in a variety of areas." Web and voice self-service boost customer satisfaction and yield big savings

Black & Decker has been able to improve the customer experience and achieve substantial cost savings using RightNow’s industry-leading self service customer care applications. It first implemented web self-service, which reduced email volume by a remarkable 25 percent in the first 90 days. As Udzinski and his team continued to grow the company’s knowledge base and fine-tune various configuration parameters, the system became more and more effective. So, in addition to avoiding emails and phone calls, Black & Decker is now able to provide its customers with immediate answers to their most common questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In fact, RightNow successfully answered 94.6 percent of the 854,984 questions customer brought to the system last year. Udzinski estimates that the savings from this RightNow feature alone amounts to more than $250,000 annually in the deflection of tens of thousands of calls.

Subsequently, Black & Decker added voice self-service. Instead of making all 3,000 knowledge items from its web self-service knowledge base available on the phone, Black & Decker focused on a much smaller number of high-volume questions. This strategy turned out to be quite successful— with the voice knowledge base handling greater than 50 percent of customer inquiries—and the RightNow voice self-service system wound up paying for itself in about 90 days.

“Black & Decker customers often have questions at night or over the weekend when they’re working on a project,” notes Udzinski. “It’s great to be able to answer those questions online or over the phone without having to staff our contact centers with additional shifts.”

SaaS Model Equips Agents Everywhere To Help Customers And Capture Market Insight

Black & Decker originally embraced RightNow’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model because it offered fast time-to-benefit and eliminated the IT overhead associated with conventional internal software implementations. But it turns out that the SaaS model is also invaluable for extending RightNow’s capabilities wherever they’re needed.

For example, when Black & Decker engaged with a domestic outsourcer for first-tier contact center applications, RightNow’s SaaS model made it easy to quickly provide the outsourcer’s staff with Black & Decker’s RightNow system on their desktops. This means that calls and emails handled by the outsourcer are tracked and managed in the same database as those handled by Black & Decker’s in-house staff. The outsourcer’s staff also has online access to the Black & Decker knowledge base—which means that even new trainees can provide customers with consistent, accurate answers to thousands of common questions.

The same principle applies to the companies Black & Decker acquires. Once Black & Decker acquires another company, it’s important for that company to meet the customer experience standards associated with the Black & Decker brand. It’s also important for Black & Decker to quickly gain the same depth of insight into the acquired company’s customers as it has into its existing ones.

To fulfill these objectives it’s critical to deliver RightNow’s functionality to contact center agent desktops at these acquired businesses, wherever they may be. And with RightNow, that’s as easy as giving these agents a password and a bit of training. This ease of deployment has also enabled Black & Decker to take advantage of RightNow’s powerful solutions in Germany and the United Kingdom.

“With a conventional client/server application, it can be very expensive and arduous to install a new business system in an acquired company’s existing IT environment,” explains Udzinski. “But with RightNow, we can get new users up and running almost immediately.”

A Great Customer Experience For A Great Consumer Brand

Black & Decker has taken the added step of integrating RightNow with its enterprise SAP system to expedite a variety of processes. For example, if the resolution of a customer problem requires Black & Decker to send them product, agents can do so from their RightNow screens. This integration also enables them to check on the status of shipments to the customer—right down to the carrier’s tracking number.

"RightNow Professional Services, working in concert with Black & Decker's IT staff, did a great job of customizing the system to meet our specific needs," says Udzinski. "The integration of RightNow with SAP saves our agents a lot of time and enables us to service our customers more effectively."

The combination of these integrations with RightNow’s native functionality enables Black & Decker to handle every customer interaction swiftly and effectively. Customers rarely have to wait more than a minute for someone to pick up the phone when they call, and they get replies to their emails in less than one business day.

In addition to praising RightNow’s technology, Udzinski points out the role that RightNow’s ongoing engagement with Black & Decker has played in the company’s successful pursuit of customer-centricity. He is particularly enthusiastic about RightNow’s Tune-Up program, which provides free periodic consulting that helps Black & Decker get the most out of RightNow’s technology. “The price is right,” he jokes. “And the advice we get always helps us gain that little extra edge we need to take even better care of our customers and achieve even greater operational efficiency.”

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About Black And Decker Corporation

Black & Decker® is a global manufacturer of power tools and accessories, hardware and home improvement products, and technology-based fastening systems. The company markets its products and services in more than 100 countries, with manufacturing operations in 11 countries. Black & Decker has earned its reputation for innovation in product design, customer-focus, quality, and value. Enjoying worldwide recognition for its brand, Black & Decker also has the most extensive global distribution in its industry.