Fast-growing Higher One Leverages RightNow To Deliver Great Service While Keeping Costs Low
Goals
- Ensure visibility into customer issues across all communication channels
- Prevent customer service costs from growing at the same rate as the business
- Deliver effective, 24-hour-a-day online self-service to a highly internet-oriented customer base
Achievements
- Unified, highly efficient customer care environment for phone, email and the web
- 40 percent increase in customer service staff during period of 100 percent business growth
- 96 percent self-service success rate
Quality customer service is essential for customer retention and business growth. Highly efficient customer service is important for keeping costs from growing as fast as revenue. And customer service that’s designed specifically to support business strategy is a plain old home run.
And Higher One has certainly hit that home run. The company’s financial services, which are targeted at colleges and universities, are now being used by over a quarter-million students—more than twice as many as a year ago. Yet, thanks to RightNow's customer service software solution, the company has only had to increase its customer service staff headcount by only 40 percent.
Just as important, students are now able to use the web to get immediate, accurate answers to their questions about Higher One’s services. That high level of service ensures customer satisfaction, optimizes retention and makes students more likely to recommend the company’s services to others.
“Today’s students are strongly inclined to use online self-service information resources,” declares Higher One chief operating officer Miles Lasater. “RightNow is therefore an ideal platform for creating a service environment that’s tailored to their needs and preferences.”
Superior Functionality And Value
Lasater selected RightNow's customer service software solution over the competing vendors he evaluated. One major advantage in RightNow’s favor was its on demand delivery model. “With RightNow, we gained the functionality we need without having to invest in a lot of IT infrastructure or take on a lot of additional administrative overhead,” says Lasater. “That makes RightNow a very compelling value.”
Lasater also appreciates RightNow’s incident tracking capabilities, which are used for both email and phone. This multi-channel approach means that customer service representatives can view a student’s entire incident history on a single screen, providing the context necessary to solve problems more efficiently.
In addition, Lasater says that RightNow’s workflow architecture has some fundamental advantages over competing solutions. “With RightNow, everything is closely linked to the customer’s email—so whenever an action takes place, you can automatically let the customer know about it,” he explains. “That customer-centric approach is very valuable for creating a high-touch, high-trust relationship.”
RightNow’s powerful self-service technology functionality was also a key differentiator. Lasater found the intuitive search interface and SmartAssistant™ feature, which pre-emptively presents knowledge base content to customers when they submit a question, particularly appealing. He also appreciated RightNow’s application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the self-service challenge.
“I liked the fact that RightNow offered more than just a simple keyword search,” he recalls. “RightNow actually ‘learns’ what students are looking for, so they we can give them what they need even though they may not be sure exactly how to find it.”
His faith in RightNow’s self-service technology turned out to be well placed. Higher One currently has a self-service success rate of 96 percent. And SmartAssistant is successfully answering more than 60 percent of the questions submitted by students from the system’s web interface.
RightNow: A Committed Partner
Lasater lauds what he calls “RightNow’s culture of service.” That culture is manifested in RightNow programs such as Tune Ups, which provide free assessment and advice about system implementation, and the Customer Success Index, which helps RightNow clients determine whether or not they’re getting maximum value out of their software investment. “RightNow has demonstrated that it wants to make sure we get as much benefit as possible out of their solution,” observes Lasater.
According to Lasater, everyone he has worked with at RightNow has demonstrated a true commitment to Higher One’s success. “We’ve even had access to the president of the company, Greg Gianforte,” he points out. “That kind of executive access is not something that’s very common among software vendors.”
As Higher One continues with its aggressive business plan, Lasater sees RightNow continuing to play a critical role in keeping customer loyalty high and operating costs low. “RightNow has returned substantial value on our investment by empowering us to deliver superlative service to a rapidly growing customer base without diverting limited budget dollars to either contact center staff or IT infrastructure,” he says. “I would definitely recommend RightNow to anyone looking for a better, more efficient way to manage customer care.”
Higher One Support Site | Higher One Homepage
About Higher One, Inc
Focused exclusively on higher education, Higher One provides refund management services to higher education institutions and banking services to members of their community through a card based solution. Higher One's integrated solution helps universities reduce administrative costs, streamline business processes, create new revenue streams, increase student customer service and strengthen the campus community. To date, Higher One has disbursed half a billion dollars in refunds for its university clients. More than 250,000 students, faculty, and staff at distinguished public and private universities use Higher One's services through their ID or refund card.
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