RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

DivXNetworks Supports A Successful Global Branding Strategy And Rapid Worldwide Growth With RightNow

Goals

• Cost-efficiently provide quality support to a rapidly growing number of users of a free entry-level product
• Provide OEMs and other partners with premium support to keep revenue-critical business relationships strong
• Automate other key business processes to ensure operational efficiency during rapid business growth

Achievements

• 160 million codec users worldwide supported with just five first-tier technicians
• Highly responsive support provided to high-profile partners including Sony, Mediatek and others
• Effective reporting and controls implemented for workflows ranging from OEM certification to account management

How do you cost-efficiently support 160 million end-users of a product you're giving away for free? How do you deliver blue-chip technical services to blue-chip business partners that include companies like Sony and Mediatek? And how do you ensure that both the "pull" of your end-users and the "push" of your partners remain strong enough to drive exponential business growth on a global scale?

If You're DivXNetworks, You Do It With RightNow.

With the help of RightNow, DivXNetworks has become one of the most remarkable success stories in the highly competitive multimedia market. Using a "give away the razors to sell the razor blades" strategy, DivXNetworks has made its multimedia creation, playback and delivery technology a de facto video standard. As a result, the DivX logo is becoming to digital multimedia what "Intel Inside" became to PCs in the 80's and 90's.

Of course, DivX's meteoric rise isn't entirely due to the result of its RightNow implementation. The company has done a superlative job of developing technology, executing its branding strategy, and forging relationships with strategic partners that include content providers, manufacturers of consumer electronics and other software developers. But RightNow has proven to be of enormous value in maintaining the loyalty of all of DivXNetworks' diverse constituencies and in ensuring its ability to rapidly and cost-effectively scale its business.

"RightNow has enabled us to quickly transform both customer-facing and internal business processes from the relatively primitive state they were in when we first launched the company to the highly efficient and manageable systems we now have in place to support the world's leading global multimedia brand," declares DivXNetworks' director of support operations Sue Montgomery. "The power, elegance and practicality of RightNow's on demand CRM solutions have been and continue to be of extraordinary benefit to our business."

The Giveaway Challenge

A major piece of DivXNetworks' grand strategy is the free distribution of its DivX codec. A codec is a small piece of software that allows a desktop media player or other device to play (or "decode") a file that has been created (or "encoded") using that same codec. The DivX codec is specifically designed both to provide high audio/video quality and to make the most efficient use of the processing power of whatever PC or other device it's running on.

By giving away its codec for free, DivXNetworks seeded the market with a huge number of potential consumers of DivX-based content and DivX-certified devices. The problem, of course, was all these users inevitably had technical questions about the codec. If DivXNetworks had been unable to answers these questions in a reasonable amount of time, users would likely have been turned off to the technology; which would have had an extremely negative impact on the company's overall strategy.

That possibility became quite real a few years ago when the number of DivX codec users reached about 70 million. "Without an automated customer service environment, we just couldn't scale our support to meet demand," recalls Montgomery. "Users were waiting several weeks for answers to their questions or they were wandering around a variety of online multimedia communities searching for the information they needed."

With RightNow's on demand CRM solutions, however, conditions changed quickly and dramatically. Using RightNow's powerful online knowledge base, users were able to get answers to their questions immediately on a 24/7 basis. The site became such a powerful resource for users that traffic grew 500 percent in just three months. And RightNow's workflow functions enabled DivXNetworks' staff to handle any incidents that weren't answered via self-service with maximum speed and efficiency. So email replies that used to take over a week were soon being sent out within 48 hours, and replies to the RightNow-powered "Ask-A-Question" webform were being responded to in less than 24 hours.

Even more impressively, these response times were consistently maintained as the installed base for the free DivX codec exceeded 160 million users worldwide; even though DivXNetworks only needed to employ five full-time staffers for first-tier support.

Know Thy Customer

RightNow also provided DivXNetworks with tremendous visibility into its customers and their concerns. For example, one RightNow report highlighted the fact that at one point about 37 percent of the company's support volume was being driven by problems in the registration process. Using that report, Montgomery was able to assign a hard dollar figure to the problem. She then brought the problem and its quantified cost to the attention of DivXNetworks managers who modified the registration process, thereby saving the company tens of thousands of dollars and improving customer satisfaction levels.

RightNow also showed DivXNetworks that a growing number of its users were speakers of German, French and Japanese. The company responded by adding RightNow interfaces in those languages as well. This further enhanced customer satisfaction and helped support the company's penetration of overseas markets.

"Because our codec is free, we didn't have a clear picture of who our customers were," explains Montgomery. "But thanks to RightNow, we now gain more and more insight into our customer base every day as we respond to their questions and interact with them via the internet."

Making Global Partnerships Work

DivXNetworks' challenge in supporting its business partners was the converse of its end-user support challenge. About two-thirds of DivXNetworks' income is generated by licensing revenues from partners ranging from top chipmakers and consumer electronics manufacturers such as Sony and Mediatek to leading multimedia tool developers such as Roxio and CyberLink. The level of technical support it provides to these partners therefore has to be superlative.

Here again RightNow has proven to be extraordinarily valuable. The questions that engineers from these partner companies ask are often quite sophisticated. So, while DivXNetworks has dedicated people working first-tier support for its partners, many partner issues have to be referred back to engineering staff and product managers. With RightNow, these escalations can be closely monitored, ensuring that every question is responded to in a timely manner.

And in addition to leveraging the email response management and online knowledge base support tools for end-users, DivXNetworks is also taking advantage of RightNow's call tracking capabilities and survey functionality to better serve their partners; giving the company full visibility into what kinds of issues are causing its partners the greatest concern.

According to Montgomery, the efficient support DivX provides to end-users is also essential for forging strong business relationships with its global partners. "It's important for our partners to know that we are making the investments necessary to ensure that their customers are going to get all the support they need from us if they have a technical question about creating or viewing multimedia files," she points out. "The robust global support environment we've created with RightNow is thus an important piece of our overall partner marketing strategy."

Beyond Service And Support

Like many other RightNow clients, DivXNetworks has leveraged RightNow's workflow management capabilities for business processes other than customer service and support. For example, the company has taken advantage of the RightNow API toolkit to create a customized system for tracking its third-party product certification process and automatically publishing the names of products that successfully make it through that process. This benefits DivX, product vendors, and retailers looking for DivX-compatible solutions.

"RightNow makes it easy for us to track every step in the certification process, and it ensures that our online database of DivX-compatible multimedia products is complete and fully up-to-date," says Montgomery. "It certainly beats the conventional methods of keeping our website up-to-date."

Montgomery gives RightNow's on demand CRM technology high marks for its robust functionality, adaptability and ease of implementation. "The RightNow environment is obviously designed to deliver very rapid time-to-benefit and address the fundamental process issues of workflow, knowledge management and reporting," she says. "We continue to find new ways it can benefit our company, our partners and the consumer."

She also lauds RightNow's account managers and technical consultants. "RightNow has made every effort to understand our business and help us meet our unique and difficult operational challenges," she says. "They're an exemplary partner in every way."

DivXNetworks Support Site | DivXNetworks Homepage

About DivXNetworks

DivXNetworks creates and distributes DivX video technology, an international phenomenon that has revolutionized the creation, playback and delivery of high-quality digital video. With over 160 million users worldwide and an estimated two billion DivX files in existence, DivX video offers a full range of video solutions for the software, hardware, video-on-demand and gaming markets, leveraging the market's leading video compression technology to create a seamless, connected consumer experience across devices and platforms.