RightNow® Reduces Email To Contact Center By 25 Percent, Increasing Transactional Emails, Improves Both Employee Motivation And The Customer Experience
Goals
- Reduce non-transactional email questions into the online sales support team
- Improve customer experience
- Improve employee motivation in the online sales team
Achievements
- Over 70 percent of people using SmartAssistant don’t raise an incident due to satisfaction
- Improved team morale
- Over 25 percent reduction in non-transactional email requests coming through to the online sales support team
More than a decade ago, Eurostar changed the way people travel to Paris and Brussels forever. In fact, it doubled the amount of visitors travelling from London to both these cities. Today Eurostar has a wide range of connecting services giving their travelers links to over 100 destinations across Europe.
Due to the growing popularity of the high-speed rail service, Eurostar’s online sales support team were subject to increasing non-transactional emails, which reduced the team’s productivity. Train timetable questions were escalating and as a result both employee motivation and the customers’ experience were being affected. Eurostar sought a technology provider to deliver a customer management solution able to solve this problem.
RightNow was the partner of choice; offering an online, self-learning knowledge base, enabling customers to have immediate answers to questions at their fingertips – consistent and accurate information 24x7x365, resulting in better service for Eurostar’s travelers and enabling employees to deal with more transactional queries.
A year later and Eurostar is reaping the benefits of its RightNow deployment and realizing that the CRM software application has much more to offer. Jonathan Davies, head of ecommerce at Eurostar explains:
“Our online sales support staff were receiving an increasing amount of customer emails with questions not directly related to booking a ticket. The emails were mostly about timetables and check-in times. After detailed analysis we realized that contact center staff were answering the same questions time and time again causing long waiting time for customers – frustrating for both the call center staff and the customer.”
“This was obviously bringing no return on employee investment, it was just turning the handle,” continues Davies. “We needed the team to be dedicated to customers who were trying to transact and we wanted to give the customer the freedom to answer simple questions through the website rather than going to the website to get our contact details to then email us – a long and unnecessary process for them.”
“In addition to improving the customer experience, we also wanted to motivate our staff so that they could develop their skill sets rather than answering the same questions day in, day out. To do this we needed to find a software strategy that would tackle this in a very active way.”
RightNow’s travel sector consultants recommended implementing RightNow's customer management solution in order to support Eurostar in reducing non-mission critical email, improving the customer experience and, as a result, promoting employee motivation.
The RightNow CRM software application is used by 50 agents across the Eurostar internet support team within both the frequent traveler and loyalty schemes.
“RightNow allows our agents to capture customer interactions enabling them to have a 360-degree view of all customer data and interaction history. This prevents frustrating situations for both the customer and the agent as the agent is able to see every customer interaction on screen immediately.” Davies added.
As Eurostar was keen to change the focus of the emails coming into the online sales team from informational queries to transactional ones, RightNow advised that a support page be set up on the Eurostar site in order to answer customer queries. The online customer support area is built upon the same online, self-learning knowledge base that the service agents use. This ensures that it captures and presents the right information, at the right time, to both agents and customers.
“The online customer support area is not like other company sites with static questions that never get updated. Our help area cleverly updates itself and learns from the customers’ questions enabling them and our agents to have the most-up-to date answers to their inquiries. Overall we have seen a 25 percent reduction in non-transactional queries.” Davies said.
By activating RightNow’s SmartAssistant technology, Eurostar has seen a further dramatic effect. SmartAssistant reads the customer’s questions and proactively pushes answers to them. In many cases this resolves the customer’s inquiry by providing them with content they may have over-looked during their initial search.
“Since deploying SmartAssistant, more than 70 percent of people that use it don’t raise an incident. As a result we have seen a lift in morale and productivity has increased because they are now free to support transactional queries.
“RightNow has had a very positive impact on our online sales support team,” says Davies. “We have had great feedback from them as it is such a vast improvement to what they had been using before - literally tracking Outlook and various databases – in order to best serve the customer. Everything is right where they need it, at their fingertips, which gives them and the customer great satisfaction!” Davies said.
In the future, Eurostar is considering trialing RightNow's online chat solution, a facility similar to instant messenger, so that the customer can chat directly with the agent once at the transactional stage in order to give the customer support throughout the process. They are also hoping to extend the use of the analytics and reporting aspect of the product.
Davies concludes, “RightNow has helped us empower our customer and our online support team. Our customers are able to more efficiently serve themselves, and our employees feel they are able to support any customer question. In addition it has enabled us to bring a huge amount of credibility to the commerce team and ecommerce support team based in the contact center. Overall it has been a very positive step forward for our customers and the business.”
Eurostar Support Site | Eurostar Homepage
About Eurostar
Eurostar is the fast train service linking London, Ashford, Paris, Brussels, Lille, Avignon, Calais, Disneyland Resort Paris, and the French Alps. Eurostar has won the title of "World's Leading Rail Service" for the last eight years at the World Travel Awards. Eurostar and Eurotunnel are two entirely different companies with two different management teams. Eurostar is Eurotunnel's largest customer. In 2007, Eurostar will switch to St. Pancras International. Journey times will fall further with London-Paris down to 2 hours 15 minutes, London-Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes, and London-Lille just 1 hour 20 minutes. For more information, go to www.eurostar.com.
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