Rightnow® Helps Eharmony Satisfy And Retain 15 Million Customers
Goals
- Deliver world-class customer care
- Answer customers’ questions via most appropriate channel
- Closely monitor the “customer’s voice”
Achievements
- Substantial increase in customer satisfaction ratings for email interactions
- 92 percent customer satisfaction level for phone incidents 30 percent reduction in email workloads, with substantial increase in customer satisfaction for email support
- Retention rate for trial subscription offer tripled
As the internet’s #1 trusted relationship service, members trust eHarmony to help them with a highly important personal need: finding their soul mate. This often requires attentive “hand holding” as members go through the eHarmony process.
RightNow is the perfect match for eHarmony. With RightNow, eHarmony can move routine member questions to web self-service, so its contact center staff is free to speak on the phone with members who need more in-depth guidance. RightNow also provides eHarmony with the customer insight it needs to continuously improve its online relationship-seeking experience.
As a result, eHarmony’s customer satisfaction scores have soared. Retention of customers taking advantage of its risk-free trial subscription offer has tripled. Just as important, its contact center continues to become more and more efficient as its RightNow-powered self service customer care absorbs a growing percentage of its service-and-support workload.
“RightNow enables us to provide a consistently excellent experience for our customers across all of our communication channels,” says Scott Ackerman, eHarmony’s vice president of customer care. “This excellence and efficiency is helping us grow our customer base, maintain our brand dominance, and optimize our operating margins.”
World-Class Customer Care Via Phone, Email, And The Web
eHarmony had been using other CRM software applications before it turned to RightNow, but quickly outgrew it as its membership skyrocketed and it raised its quality-of-experience objectives. eHarmony was especially looking for a more scalable solution that could provide the complete, integrated functionality required to support the company’s long-term growth. The company also needed more robust online self-service and more sophisticated reporting to meet its near-term goals for improving its customer experience.
After evaluating several offerings from leading vendors, Ackerman and his team decided on RightNow.
RightNow proved itself to be a vastly superior solution for online self-service. Using RightNow, eHarmony was able to rapidly build a very effective knowledge foundation of nearly 400 answers that customers could search by keyword, topic, or natural language query. Within a few months, this easy-to-use self-service resource produced a 30 percent reduction in email volume.
Customers also began to spend more time exploring the knowledge base in order to educate themselves about eHarmony’s various functions and features. eHarmony added screen shots and other graphics to make the site easier to use for even the least internet-literate customers. In fact, customers found this content so compelling that they were soon generating greater than of 1.5 million page views per month.
RightNow helped eHarmony improve its performance on the email side as well. Agents can now use content from the knowledge base to more quickly respond to customers’ emails. Escalation and routing rules further streamline email management. These factors, combined with the reduction in overall email workloads, enabled eHarmony to significantly bring its email turnaround times down. In addition, customer satisfaction with eHarmony’s email support jumped substantially.
As more routine queries are moved to email and the web, eHarmony’s contact center staff now has more time to spend with subscribers on the phone. This ability to provide unhurried care to callers who often have sensitive issues they want to discuss has led to a 92 percent satisfaction level for phone incidents.
Plus, because the same knowledge foundation is applied across all three communication channels, eHarmony can be sure that the same clear, consistent information is being provided to customers regardless of how they contact the company.
“RightNow is a powerful solution for managing knowledge and making that knowledge immediately available to whoever needs it,” says Ackerman. “It also takes a lot of pressure off of our staff, so they can provide the kind of caring, patient service that’s appropriate for our service and our brand.”
A Clearer View Of The Outside And Inside Worlds
Because it uses RightNow to track the disposition of service and support incidents across all communication channels, eHarmony gains the added benefit of full visibility into its customers’ top concerns. So if some site feature begins to generate a growing amount of contact center activity, the information can be quickly relayed to the appropriate manager for corrective action. And rather than simply passing along anecdotal feedback, Ackerman and his team can precisely quantify the amount of activity being generated by any particular issue.
eHarmony also uses RightNow to discover any emerging internal issues with its contact center. For example, if it is consistently taking more than a few hours to turn around emails relating to a specific type of account problem, the company can take steps to make those problems easier to resolve.
eHarmony has taken the unusual step of using RightNow to distribute subject-matter “quizzes” to its contact center staff. This enables the company to proactively discover if any individual agents—or the staff as a whole—need additional training on any specific topic.
eHarmony has taken several integration measures to further streamline the customer experience. The RightNow database is linked to the company’s Oracle customer database so that user and member data is always kept synchronized and up-to-date. An integration with the company’s implementation of Microsoft’s Active Directory enables contact center staff to gain access to RightNow via a single sign-on, rather than having to log into the system with a separate ID and password. And pass-through authentication on the website allows customers who have already logged in to access their personal information in the “My Stuff” tab of RightNow without having to enter a separate login. Ackerman adds that RightNow has made it very easy for eHarmony to put the entire solution in place. As an on demand solution, RightNow eliminated the headaches and hurdles associated with conventional CRM software implementation: the acquisition and installation of additional IT infrastructure, the ongoing management of operating systems and software, etc. RightNow’s intuitive design enabled users to get up to speed quickly on the system, and anything they didn’t quite understand was fully addressed in training. And RightNow has continued to be highly responsive to eHarmony’s needs as the company continues to find ways to take greater advantage of the software’s rich functionality.
“RightNow has the same passion as we do about maintaining a culture of customer care,” says Ackerman. “That makes them a very compelling business and technology partner for eHarmony.”
eHarmony Support Site | | eHarmony Hompage |
About eHarmony
Backed by 35 years of clinical and empirical research, eHarmony is the internet's #1 trusted relationship service and the only site dedicated to building the relationships of both singles and married couples. eHarmony was founded by one of America's best-known relationship experts, best-selling author and clinical psychologist Dr. Neil Clark Warren.
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