Edmunds.com Turns To RightNow To Provide Critical Edge In Launch Of Its First Paid Online Services
Goals
- Improve online customer care in support of new paid services
- Overcome limitations of Outlook-based email system
- Free subject-matter experts from having to answer repetitive questions
Achievements
- Reduced submitted incidents by more than 50 percent in just a few months
- Gained clear, immediate and actionable insight into customers' issues
- Reduced workloads for subject-matter experts
When Edmunds.com, a provider of online automotive information to consumers, launched its first paid service, it turned to RightNow to help it meet the rising service expectations that paying customers would demand.
Until it launched its first paid service, all resources on Edmunds.com's site were free with the company's revenues derived from advertising, book sales, data sales and referrals. It was adequate, then, for service response times to be a bit longer and to ask its customer care representatives to manage consumer inquiries along with other duties. But the new line of business brought new demands. Specifically, Edmunds.com faced a compelling need to deploy an effective customer self-service system to answer routine questions while using business rules to properly route and escalate questions that demanded customer care intervention.
"When you're giving information away for free, consumers don't exhibit very high service expectations," explains director of advanced products Brian Terr. "But when you charge them for premium content, it's clear they expect you to answer their questions quickly."
By implementing RightNow's customer self-service system, the online automotive information leader is able to maintain the high quality service its customers have come to expect even as service inquiries rise due to expanding business. And it achieves this service level using subject-matter experts who can still spend most of their time focused on other aspects of the business.
This remarkable achievement is made possible by the combination of RightNow's self-service capabilities—allowing customers to quickly find their own answers on the Edmunds.com site—and easy-to-use email management and business rules that drastically reduce the work involved in handling the questions customers submit online.
"RightNow is one of the best solutions we've ever purchased," says Terr. "It immediately revolutionized the way we provide customer care without requiring us to make inordinate investments of either effort or capital."
As Terr began his research, RightNow's name quickly rose to the top of the list. In fact, two of the companies that Terr works closely with to track best practices for online companies, CARFAX and MyFamily.com, were already experienced users and avid fans of RightNow.
"Their enthusiasm made it pretty clear that we should consider RightNow," recalls Terr.
To ensure he'd done his diligence, Terr compared RightNow to CRM solutions by other vendors, such as Siebel Systems. Siebel came up short in a few areas according to Terr's evaluation, including knowledge base management and ease-of-use. Just as important, Terr quickly saw that signing on with Siebel would likely mean a lot of expensive, time-consuming implementation work. "I may have been able to build a good system using Siebel, but the necessary customization and integration seemed like it would take longer," he says. "With RightNow, I got what I needed right out of the box."
RightNow was up and running very quickly—and began delivering quantifiable benefits. Terr populated his knowledge base with existing information from the site and some additional content. Two months later, the number of incidents that Edmunds.com subject-matter experts had to personally handle was reduced by more than half—from 2,000 per month to fewer than 900. Meanwhile 95 percent of the customers using the self-service area of the site did not have to use the Ask-a-Question escalation feature.
In addition to delivering great service and keeping costs down, the RightNow customer self-service system enables Edmunds.com to gain immediate insight into any issues customers encounter with its site or services. And it delivers these benefits without putting additional strain on an IT organization that already has its hands full maintaining the company's competitive superiority.
As a result of RightNow's approach to intelligent, customer-driven content, new answers were added to the knowledge base almost daily, ensuring that self-service statistics would continue to improve.
"One of the great things about RightNow is that our customer care workers can easily add new content to our knowledge base without requiring any help from IT," says Terr.
RightNow's business rules are particularly crucial to the company's customer service success. Edmunds.com depends on subject-matter experts (who handle other responsibilities) to answer certain types of incoming questions. With RightNow's CRM solutions, customer's questions are automatically routed to the appropriate individual. If a response is not generated in a timely manner, the issue is escalated to another appropriate staffer. This ensures that nearly every question gets answered.
Terr says RightNow's automated rules-based approach to incident workflow is far superior to the Talisma and Outlook-based systems that Edmunds.com used previously. "With RightNow, we don't need to have someone dedicated to distributing and routing customers' questions as they come in," he says. "Our specialists can quickly deal with whatever questions come their way and get right back to whatever else they have to do."
RightNow does more than help Edmunds.com get information to customers. It also ensures the company can get important feedback from customers. RightNow's reports provide complete visibility into emerging trends. And Edmunds.com's quality assurance staff gets copied on incidents relating to site and service problems. This allows them to quickly respond to any problems that may arise.
Terr notes that his own service experience with RightNow has been nothing short of exceptional. "It's evident that RightNow practices what it preaches" he says. "The support we receive is top-notch."
The bottom line for Edmunds.com is that it is now able to deliver the high-quality customer experience that paying customers expect—without a conventional call center. "We're providing great support, very efficiently," declares Terr. "So it should be pretty obvious why we've joined the RightNow fan club."
Edmunds.com Support Site | Edmunds.com Homepage
About Edmunds.com
Edmunds.com is the premier online resource for automotive information. Its data, tools and services, including Edmunds.com True Market Value® pricing, are generated by Edmunds information solutions and licensed to third parties—including AOL, NYTimes.com and Automotive News. Edmunds.com was named "best car research site" by Forbes and has been selected by automotive consumers for each of the last three years as the "most useful Website" according to J.D. Power and Associates' New Autoshopper.com StudySM. The company is headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
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