Punch! Software Gains Control Of Its Outsourced Contact Center And Boosts Installed-base Revenues With RightNow®
Goals
- Gain greater control of and visibility into the outsourced contact center environment
- Market more effectively to installed base
- Optimize quality of customer care
- Control costs in the face of rapid business growth
Achievements
- Full ownership of all customer and contact center data
- 30 percent upgrade purchase rates, double the previous rate
- Improved service quality across web, email, and phone channels
- 20 percent reduction in tech support phone calls despite 10 percent business growth
Like many companies, Punch! Software—the market leader in home and landscape design software—outsources its customer service to control costs and maintain focus on its core competencies. Unfortunately, the company has had issues with multiple outsourcers who have either proven to be ineffective or have gone out of business. And when those outsourcing relationships disappeared, precious customer data disappeared with them.
So when the time came to initiate a new outsourcing relationship, Punch! wanted to protect itself by deploying a call center solution that would allow it to remain in control of its customer data. After evaluating a host of vendor offerings the company chose RightNow, which delivered many additional unexpected business benefits.
In fact, with RightNow's call center solution, Punch! is closer to its customers than ever before. It’s able to deliver a better customer experience and reduce its support costs. It has also been able to sell its market-leading home and landscape design tools more effectively than ever.
“RightNow has proven to be a great solution for maintaining control of our outsourced customer care environment, keeping support costs down, and driving revenue growth,” says Ken Beermann, Punch!’s VP of finance. “We made a very smart buying decision that has paid off many times over.”
Visibility And Control Improves The Outsourcing Value Proposition
According to Beermann, Punch! chose RightNow's CRM products for a variety of reasons—including the breadth of its functionality, its ease-of-use, and its attractive licensing terms. Most of all, though, Punch! needed a hosted solution that it could easily extend to any outsourcer as needed.
By requiring its outsourcers to use RightNow's call center solution, Punch! now retains complete control over and visibility into its customer interactions—regardless of whether the interactions take place via the web, email, or on the phone. This allows Punch!’s managers to see how well support reps working in the outsourcer’s environment are performing. They can check real-time incident status, run reports on individual agent productivity, and track service level trends. Just as important, they can see exactly what kinds of issues customers are calling and emailing the company about—so they can take appropriate action to improve the customer experience.
As an added bonus, Punch! is now able to provide suggestions to development for product enhancements and improvements based on the input of their customer base.
RightNow’s web self-service capabilities have also enabled Punch! to keep its call volume down, even as its business has grown. Tech support calls, for example, were reduced by about 20 percent—even as the company’s installed base grew by 10 percent. Punch! was even able to re-assign some of its agents to other jobs, such as testing and QA, after implementing RightNow's CRM products. And because Punch! customers have been able to get much of the information they need online, talk-times have also gone down by more than a minute.
“RightNow has made our entire tech support and customer service operation much more efficient and effective,” say Beermann. “Just as important, we can now make any changes we need to in our outsourcing relationships without worrying about loss of customer insight.”
Effective Marketing To The Installed Base
In addition to revolutionizing the management of Punch!’s outsourced service-and-support environment, RightNow has been instrumental in helping the company market its solution more effectively to its installed base. Originally, Punch! licensed RightNow for 100,000 messages per month. But RightNow made the creation and delivery of promotional mailings so easy—and the ROI for those mailings has been so high—that the company soon pushed that number up to 300,000. And now, it’s sending out around 1.3 million messages every month.
With RightNow CRM products’ graphical interface, Punch!’s staff can quickly segment its customer list and create attractive mailings specifically designed for those targeted segments. Plus, because the mailings are executed from RightNow’s super-scalable hosting facility, Punch! doesn’t have to worry about high-volume mailings eating up its own server capacity. So even its largest mailings are completed within roughly an hour.
The results of those mailings have been impressive. The company has experienced upgrades rates of 25-30 percent across its product lines—up from 15 percent prior to RightNow—significantly boosting revenue from its installed base.
The mailings also ensure that Punch!’s customers know about its full product line, strengthening its market position as a “one-stop shop.” Plus, the company can regularly put out newsletters with helpful tips and tricks for getting the most out of its products. This further enhances the customer experience and supports long-term customer loyalty.
“RightNow makes it a breeze to execute any type of campaign we need to address a particular marketing objective,” says Beermann. “For a software company like ours, the ability to communicate this efficiently and effectively with our user base is priceless.”
Punch! Software Support Site | Punch! Software Homepage
About Punch! Software
Founded in 1998, Punch! Software is the market leader in home and landscape design software. Its acclaimed graphics engine creates robust real-time 3D graphics with incredible speed and ease-of-use. More information about the Kansas City, MO-based company can be found at www.punchsoftware.com.
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