RightNow® Lets Iomega Deliver A Superlative Customer Experience Worldwide While Helping Reduce Costs
Goals:
- Optimize customer experience to maintain loyalty and support brand identity
- Upgrade and integrate a worldwide multi-channel customer support environment
- Streamline complicated, difficult-to-maintain and expensive support systems
Achievements:
- Superlative customer service-and-support experience
- Integrated multi-channel contact center environment with 11 languages deployed across multiple locations worldwide at lower capital cost than competing alternatives
- Increased agent efficiency
- Simplified, more cost-efficient systems infrastructure
When it comes to customer service and support, storage solutions market leader Iomega faces a significant challenge. On one hand, the company must deliver a superlative customer experience in order to maintain both its leadership in a highly competitive market and the power of its premium brand. On the other hand, market pressures make it essential to keep operational costs under tight control. So Iomega has to provide great support as cost-efficiently as possible.
And that’s exactly what it has been able to achieve with RightNow. RightNow’s integrated multi-channel contact center environment enables Iomega’s customer service operation to quickly and efficiently resolve problems around the world via phone, email, chat and the web. The integration of RightNow with other resources, such as Iomega’s customer database and its RMA system, further streamlines its customer experience management processes. And—thanks to its on demand architecture, the close alignment of its functionality with Iomega’s business needs, and its ease of customization—RightNow has done so at a cost/benefit ratio significantly better than the competing crm solutions Iomega evaluated.
“RightNow has proven to be the optimal solution for our very challenging business objectives,” says Mike Nikzad, vice president of customer relations, Iomega Corporation. “It has rapidly enabled us to meet our ambitious goals for both our customers’ quality-of-experience and the efficiency of our support processes.”
The Integration Advantage
Iomega initiated its contact center environment upgrade because its existing Scopus call management system had reached the end of its useful life. The company was also using separate applications to handle email and chat. Once Nikzad and his team began evaluating available software solutions, they quickly realized they would be able to improve the customer experience and increase operational efficiency if they implemented a system that managed all communication channels in a common manner.
Nikzad explains: “Let’s say one of your support people talks to a customer on the phone and suggests a solution to their problem. If the customer tries that solution and it doesn’t work, he or she may wind up initiating a chat session with a different support person the next day. In a contact center environment where you’re managing each of your communication channels separately, the customer will have to explain the problem again and explain what the first support person suggested before the second support person can start resolving the situation. That’s aggravating to the customer and a big time-waster for your staff.”
To overcome this problem, Iomega tried to have its contact center staff copy-and-paste interaction records from chat and email into Scopus. But this was time-consuming and wasn’t always done effectively.
With RightNow, on the other hand, all interactions with the customer are maintained in a common database. So all information about outstanding customer issues are available in one place regardless of which communication channel is used at any given time. And no one has to waste time manually moving information from one application to another.
In addition, RightNow supports all 11 languages Iomega requires to service its global customer base. And, common management of all communication channels also makes it much easier for Iomega to gain insight into customer issues and concerns.
Iomega also took advantage of RightNow’s integration facilities to further enable its contact center staff to provide fast, effective service to its customers. Contact center personnel can click on buttons within the RightNow console that enable them to validate warranties by entering product serial numbers, search the Iomega product database and execute credit card transactions. Another button links them to the Iomega RMA system, so they can easily initiate and/or track the status of returns. This integration includes an automated email system that notifies customers as soon as a requested product is shipped.
According to Nikzad, RightNow enabled Iomega to complete these integrations much more cost-effectively than systems from competing enterprise software vendors. “Implementation of a complete multi-channel customer care solution can be a very expensive venture taking a year or more,” he says. “RightNow's professional services team, however, was able to get the job done with reasonable costs and on schedule.”
The Simplicity Advantage
While much of the savings Iomega realized with RightNow resulted from more efficient contact center processes, another substantial portion came from RightNow’s on demand model. Iomega previously had an IT outsourcing partner hosting its Scopus servers, and had extensive WAN (wide area network) infrastructure in place to provide its call centers in the U.S. and overseas with access to those servers. With RightNow, all those hardware and network ownership costs were completely eliminated. In fact, RightNow’s Hosting Management System enables the company’s contact center team to easily administer its systems without assistance from IT.
Nikzad points out that Iomega got outstanding value from RightNow because it fit so well with his company’s functional requirements. “The other solutions we looked at would have forced us to pay for a lot of functionality that we didn’t need, and also would have required us to do a lot of customization work to get some of the functionality we really did need,” he says. “RightNow was a better buy for us because it gave us just about everything we wanted right out of the box.”
Beyond the specific functional and integration advantages of its software, Nikzad says that RightNow’s culture and business practices have also been of significant benefit to Iomega: “We could tell from the outset that RightNow was a very different type of company. They’re genuinely concerned with our success, rather than just trying to fulfill our minimum requirements. The people behind RightNow’s software are as much a part of their total value proposition as the software itself.”
Iomega Support Site | Iomega Homepage
About Iomega:
Iomega Corporation provides easy-to-use, high value storage solutions to help people protect, secure, capture and share their valuable digital information. Iomega's award-winning storage products include the Iomega® REV™ 35GB drive in several different computer interface models; Zip® 100MB, 250MB and 750MB drives; high-performance Iomega external hard drives; Iomega Mini USB drives and Micro Mini™ USB drives; Iomega external CD-RW drives; Iomega Super DVD drives and the Super DVD QuikTouch™ Video Burner; and Iomega floppy USB-powered drives. Iomega simplifies data protection and sharing at home and in the workplace with Iomega Automatic Backup software, Iomega Sync software, HotBurn® CD-recording software, and Active Disk™ technology. For networks, Iomega NAS servers offer capacities of 160GB to 1.6TB. For unlimited capacity and anytime, anywhere access, Iomega offers iStorage™ secure online storage. Iomega also offers businesses and consumers a comprehensive data recovery services solution for recovering lost data due to hardware failure, file corruption or media damage. The Company can be reached at 1-888-4-IOMEGA (888-446-6342), or on the Web at http://www.iomega.com/.
Greg Gianforte