Nine West Supports Brand Differentiation And Business Strategy With RightNow®-Powered Customer Experience
Goals:
- Provide excellent service and develop customer relationships to ensure brand loyalty
- Ensure a seamless customer experience across all channels
- Control contact center costs without adversely impacting the customer experience
Achievements:
- Prompt, effective service provided via web, email, and phone
- Feedback captured for analysis and action
- 98 percent online self-service rate
- Significant reductions in hold-times and talk-times
Retailing is a tough business. To win repeat business, you have to provide your customers with the best product and service at the point of purchase and afterwards. You have to quickly determine what’s working and what isn’t—and respond accordingly. You also have to keep your costs low to maintain healthy operating margins in the face of constant market pressures.
Footwear fashion leader Nine West has succeeded on all counts. With the help of RightNow, the company has been able to improve and integrate its multi-channel customer touch points to deliver an enhanced customer experience. And it has gained greater visibility into what its customers are thinking and doing—while achieving significant savings across its multiple brands.
“RightNow helps us earn more of our customers’ business on a daily basis by giving them a great brand experience on the web, via email, and over the phone,” says Johanna Muller, VP of retail operations. “Just as important, it enables us to deliver that differentiated experience without over-taxing our budget, our people, or our IT resources.”
Great Service Across All Communication Channels
Nine West customers have questions about all kinds of things. They may want to know about the local availability of a particular shoe they see on the company’s website. They want to follow up on an order they placed online. Or they may want to let the company know about an experience they had at a store.
Regardless of how these customers contact Nine West’s contact center, the company wants to make sure that they receive prompt, helpful service. “At the end of every interaction with our customers, we want them to feel that Nine West cares about them and is responsive to their needs,” says Muller.
RightNow supports a great web experience by providing an exceptionally effective and user-friendly online self-service resource. Customers who come to the site looking for answers can quickly find them by browsing a “Top 20” topic list, doing a keyword search, or simply typing in their question. Patented artificial intelligence guides them to appropriate content in NineWest’s RightNow-powered knowledge base—which is tightly aligned with its customers’ actual day-to-day information needs.
As a result of this combination of ease-of-use and well-aligned content, more than 98 percent of Nine West customers using the web based crm solution find what they need without having to talk to someone personally—which has helped them to significantly reduce response times. This means that Nine West customers can get immediate answers to most of their questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also means that Nine West is able to avoid repetitive questions and focus instead on continuing to deliver a great experience to customers.
RightNow also facilitates great service via email. All incoming messages are tracked so that no emails accidentally “fall between the cracks.” And if a customer’s question isn’t answered within a specified period of time, the situation is automatically escalated to a supervisor for immediate action.
RightNow's call center solutions also help Nine West handle its phone calls more efficiently using voice self-service—and an integration with Nine West’s phone switch helps further increase agent productivity. Agents can also use the RightNow knowledge base to ensure they’re giving customers accurate, up-to-date answers. This technology has helped Nine West reduce talk-times while consistently delivering excellent service.
Just as important, by providing a single system for managing communication with customers across all of these channels, RightNow ensures that the information Nine West provides is always consistent.
Muller notes that RightNow’s web-based on demand delivery model is ideal for supporting remote workers. “With RightNow, any authorized user can log into our system anywhere at any time,” she says. “That gives us the flexibility to hire agents who can work from either our corporate offices or remote locations and still provide the same quality of service.”
Fingers On The Pulse Of The Customer
In addition to helping Nine West give customers answers to their questions, RightNow allows the company to capture insights that it can use to better understand both individual customers and its market as a whole. For example, by adding a couple of custom fields to its RightNow database, Nine West can track the products and styles customers are asking questions about. By looking at this data—along with the web self-service activity tracked in RightNow—the company can readily pinpoint hot products and opportunities to improve the customer experience.
“One of the biggest potential threats to the brand experience is the unknown issue that silently erodes customer satisfaction without your realizing it,” explains Muller. “With RightNow, we don’t have to worry about that—because we have such extensive visibility into our customers’ preferences and concerns.”
Muller adds that the value of RightNow’s technology to Nine West has been significantly enhanced by RightNow’s services, including its free “Tune Up” program and its self-directed training. “RightNow makes its solution so easy for non-technical people to use,” says Muller. “That’s why I’ve still been able to effectively implement their technology, despite the fact that I am in no way an IT person.”
Building on her initial success using RightNow in support of Nine West, Muller has been able to leverage the technology across her company’s other brands—including Easy Spirit, Bandolino, Enzo Angiolini, Kasper, Jones New York, Anne Klein, and Anne Klein New York. She can staff with the utmost efficiency, since every agent has ready access to a RightNow knowledge base and a RightNow desktop application for each brand. And she can quickly and cost-effectively create a new knowledge base and desktop any time her company is ready to bring a new brand on line.
“With RightNow, we can make our customers feel good about doing business with us, even as we continue to drive down operating costs,” says Muller. “This is great technology for achieving competitive differentiation in a multi-channel world.”
Nine West Support Site | Nine West Homepage
About Nine West
In less than thirty years, Nine West has evolved to become a world-renowned fashion leader. Established in 1978, the Nine West brand took its name from its founding address at 9 West 57th Street in New York City. Today, Nine West is beloved by women around the world—offering not just footwear, but handbags, sportswear, dresses, suits, luggage, scarves and wraps, eyewear, sunglasses, legwear, outerwear, jewelry, belts, hats and cold weather accessories. Nine West is a trusted fashion advisor in every category. Sold in more than 65 countries, Nine West is recognized as a total lifestyle brand offering runway looks interpreted into real-life fashion.
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