Pinnacle Cost-efficiently Delivers Competitively Differentiated Worldwide Customer Service Via Phone, Email And The Web With RightNow
Goals
- Bring explosive growth in email support requests under control
- Provide high-quality support worldwide to maintain customer loyalty
- Improve visibility into customers' needs and concerns
Achievements
- Email volume constrained even with fast business growth
- Responsive support provided in six languages via phone, email and the web
- Ability to flexibly outsource support to multiple suppliers around the world
- Common data capture and reporting across all communication channels
Like many technology companies, Pinnacle first came to RightNow because of rapidly escalating email volume and the need to better leverage the web as a support channel. And, as it has for those other companies, RightNow proved to be the right CRM software solution for Pinnacle's primary customer service issues.
But, since that initial implementation, RightNow has done much, much more. It now provides a complete multi-channel contact center application that enables Pinnacle to flexibly outsource support operations to multiple suppliers around the world. It delivers the reporting and analytics Pinnacle needs to gain high-value insight into its customers' top needs and concerns. Plus, it allows Pinnacle to enjoy all these business benefits without requiring the involvement of its already overburdened corporate IT department.
As a result, Pinnacle is providing its global customers with the support necessary to optimize customer loyalty in a highly competitive market—and it's doing so in six different languages.
"RightNow has proven to be an exceptionally powerful platform for managing phone, email and web-based communications across our globally distributed customer service operation," declares Bertrand de Vregille, Pinnacle's director of consumer support. "It has provided us with important business advantages in a market where quality of support is a critical competitive differentiator."
Pinnacle Gets A Great Start With RightNow's Email Management Solution
The pain-point that first drove Pinnacle to look for a better way of managing support was a nearly overwhelming volume of email. The amount of email increased steadily until nearly 5,000 messages were arriving every month in six different languages. The company's Outlook email system simply didn't provide an effective way of managing so many support requests. So de Vregille knew he had to find a way both to more efficiently manage his existing email volume and to keep that volume from continuing to spiral upwards.
He also understood the best way to keep email volume down would be to improve Pinnacle's online knowledge base. Unfortunately, Pinnacle's existing system made it difficult to keep the company's support site updated and also lacked a variety of functions that could make the company's online self-service resources more useful to customers—and thereby reduce the number of email inquiries.
Based on these needs, de Vregille and his team began to evaluate available customer service solutions from different vendors. However, one company differentiated itself from the pack: RightNow.
From the very beginning, de Vregille could tell RightNow was a cut above its competitors. "RightNow's salespeople expressed much more interest in our business and our specific needs than the others," recalls de Vregille. "It was evident that in addition to acquiring the technology we needed, we were also getting a highly engaged business partner."
It was also clear that RightNow's CRM software solution had the functionality and flexibility Pinnacle needed to meet its immediate objectives. Just as important, its on demand delivery model enabled Pinnacle to deploy its new, improved service environment quickly and easily.
The multi-channel contact center application implementation was a success. Pinnacle customers began using the company's RightNow-powered self-service resources by the thousands. Email volume stopped growing, even as Pinnacle's business grew over the next three years. So Pinnacle customers got the fast, accurate answers they needed—while Pinnacle kept its support costs under control.
Multi-channel, Multi-language Outsourcing
In the next phase of its implementation, Pinnacle took advantage of RightNow's fully web-based on demand delivery model to pursue a global outsourcing strategy for both phone and email. To reduce its costs, Pinnacle began contracting with outsourcers in several different countries to handle first-tier support calls. With RightNow, those outsourcers could easily be provided with access to a common phone and email incident management system—which was also shared by managers and contact centers in the U.S. and Europe.
This globally shared system delivers many essential business benefits. First, it ensures all of Pinnacle's outsourcers manage incidents in a common manner. Second, it provides all outsourced contact center staff with access to a common knowledge base, ensuring their ability to give accurate and consistent answers to customers' questions. Third, it gives Pinnacle's customer service managers full historical and real-time visibility into outsourcer performance metrics. And, finally, it enables this shared global customer care environment to function without requiring Pinnacle to build and maintain an expensive, complex wide area network.
Thus, Pinnacle can add contact center capabilities wherever it makes the most economic sense to support customers in any language. So the company has been able to engage contact center outsourcers in Pakistan and Brazil to handle English-speaking customers, while adding another outsourcing partner in Romania to provide service in French and German. All told, Pinnacle now provides support in six languages from nine different locations around the world.
"With RightNow, we don't have to make additional investments in IT every time we want to add or change an outsourcing partner somewhere in the world," explains de Vregille. "If they have a PC with internet connectivity, we can give them secure access to our RightNow system."
Maximum Customer Insight Helps Drive Business Decisions
By capturing information about every phone call, email exchange and web self-service session in every language across all locations in a common RightNow database, Pinnacle has gained tremendous insight into its customers worldwide. This information enables Pinnacle to continuously improve the customer support experience. It also provides highly valuable feedback for the company's product managers—such as which product features are giving customers the most trouble.
"It's great to have all your information about all your customers available in one place," says de Vregille. "RightNow's integrated view of phone, email and the web helps us to make better, faster decisions that are driven by both explicit customer feedback and the implicit cues we get from observing trends in their behaviors."
De Vregille adds that his initial impression of RightNow as a highly customer-driven company has not changed over the years. "RightNow remains a very responsive technology partner and has done a good job keeping our global, web-based customer service environment up and running," he says. "We look forward to expanding our relationship with them as we continue to add the new capabilities we need to maintain our market leadership on a worldwide scale."
About Pinnacle Systems
Pinnacle Systems provides broadcasters and consumers with cutting-edge digital media creation, storage, and playback solutions for use at Home, in the Studio and on the Air. Pinnacle Systems' award winning digital media solutions are in use around the world for broadcast, video editing, DVD and CDR authoring and on the internet.
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