RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

PurchasingNet Unifies And Optimizes End-to-end Customer-facing Business Processes With RightNow®

Goals

• Deliver a consistently exceptional customer experience across all touch-points
• Optimize prospect conversion rates
• Optimize lifetime customer revenue
• Reduce costs
• Gain maximum insight into customers’ needs and preferences
• Improve key interdepartmental transitions of prospect and customer information

Achievements

• Single, information-rich 360-degree view of the customer
• Rapid, accurate responses to customer lifecycle events
• Improved marketing, sales, and service drives growth
• Automated workflow, improved operational efficiency, and reduced operational costs within six months

Before implementing RightNow's hosted CRM software solution, PurchasingNet used a variety of different applications, databases, and vendors for different aspects of its business. One system was used to manage sales activity. Another one was used to do email marketing campaigns. Still another was used to capture leads on the company’s website. In addition to not being integrated with each other, these systems did not provide sufficient workflow automation or policy enforcement.

This CRM environment created multiple problems for PurchasingNet. Customer data often had to be re-keyed—making many processes slow and error-prone. Information about customers captured in one part of the business wasn’t always visible to those in other parts of the business. It was difficult to enforce consistency with best practices for sales and solution implementation.

All of this undermined the quality and consistency of the customer experience. It also created inefficiencies in PurchasingNet’s marketing, sales, and service operations.

With RightNow's hosted CRM software solution, the company now has a single, highly automated environment for managing workflows across all departments—helping to drive a 23 percent year-over-year increase in revenue. Information captured anywhere is visible everywhere. So every interaction with the customer is prompt, appropriate, and based on up-to-date information. And everyone can do their jobs without wasting time or effort.

“RightNow lets us do exactly what we want to do with every customer, exactly when we want to do it,” says PurchasingNet Senior VP Laurene Fielder. “The result is happier customers, faster realization of greater revenue, and significant improvements in everyone’s productivity.”

Highly Efficient And Sophisticated Marketing

PurchasingNet has several ways of generating leads. Through sponsored search, trade publications, industry electronic newsletters, and other sources, the company drives prospects to its website, where they can quickly submit some preliminary information about their organization and their needs. Now, all of their online lead generation web forms are managed by RightNow's hosted CRM software solution, prospect data automatically creates a new customer record that is forwarded immediately to an admin for verification and assignment to the appropriate salesperson.

PurchasingNet also attends trade shows and purchases lists from leading organizations for corporate purchasing, IT, and financial professionals. With RightNow's hosted CRM software solution, the company can readily import this list data and create sophisticated multi-stage marketing campaigns that it can inexpensively execute via email. RightNow makes it easy to target messages to specific types of recipients, manage opt-in/opt-out lists, and perform preliminary message testing before sending out a campaign to all targeted recipients. Marketing managers have complete visibility into deliverability, open rates, and response rates.

Just as important, leads can be passed along to salespeople for immediate action without any re-keying or delay. Salespeople can also see exactly what marketing message the customer received—as well as the particular link the customer clicked, if the campaign had multiple options or components. This enables PurchasingNet’s salespeople to respond in a timely and fully informed way when they contact someone whose interest has been piqued by a campaign mailing.

PurchasingNet can use this same approach to sell new products and services to its installed base—or to simply provide them with newsletter-style mailings that help them get maximum value out of their existing PurchasingNet solutions. This type of communication strengthens PurchasingNet’s position as a strategic business partner and further enhances the overall customer experience the company delivers.

The entire process is much faster and more cost-effective than the previous systems PurchasingNet used to do its mailings—allowing them to send targeted messages to 20 percent more contacts per month. And because all activity takes place on RightNow’s servers, the company can quickly execute even very large-scale mailing without taxing its own data center capacity.

“RightNow basically enables us to do whatever type of campaign we want to do with a bit of typing, dragging, dropping, and clicking,” says Fielder. “It’s a very powerful and flexible solution that both increases our marketing reach and lets us seamlessly feed the results of our marketing activities right into our sales organization.”

Boosting Sales Performance And Predictability

RightNow's hosted CRM software solution has also streamlined PurchasingNet’s sales processes. Salespeople can now prioritize their daily to-do lists and effortlessly manage all their relationships as they try to convert leads into opportunities and opportunities into deals. Any email they send to a contact is automatically included in that contact’s history. And using the Outlook toolbar sync feature they can quickly add notes about any phone call or in-person visit to that contact’s history as well. Plus, because all customer data is maintained in a single database, salespeople automatically get the benefit of any updates to that data made by account administrators, professional services, or technical support staff.

Just as important, salespeople have full visibility into any open service or support issues. This ensures they are in the know regarding any outstanding issues when they call on a customer to check on an opportunity or deal.

PurchasingNet is also using RightNow's hosted CRM software solution to keep salespeople on track with the company’s structured sales process. This is particularly important for PurchasingNet, because its sales process requires consensus-building between the customer’s procurement, financial, and IT decision-makers. By setting up “milestones” for each business relationship, the company’s sales director can ensure that salespeople don’t inadvertently miss a key step in the process.

This discipline also brings greater predictability to sales revenue forecasting. Instead of just relying on each salesperson’s personal predictions about which deals will close by the end of the reporting period, RightNow's hosted CRM software solution allows projections to be based on the actual tracked progress of each opportunity. Projections are therefore no longer skewed by the fact that some salespeople tend to be overly optimistic, while others are very conservative.

“RightNow is a fantastic tool for both our salespeople and our sales managers,” says Fielder. “We can maintain better relationships with more active and prospective customers more efficiently than ever—and avoid the kinds of mistakes that can result in lost business or delayed closes.”

Cost-effectively Delivering A Superior Post-sales Experience

Once PurchasingNet’s sales team closes a new piece of business, RightNow continues to manage the subsequent workflow. Actually, there is an automatic “handoff” to two areas. One is the accounts payable side, which is responsible for account management issues such as contract paperwork and tracking payment milestones. The other is the professional services engagement, which manages the multi-phased process of structuring and implementing the customer’s procurement and payables system. RightNow is being used to automate these processes and provide management with full visibility into their progress.

RightNow's hosted CRM software solution is also used to manage all aspects of customer care across all communication channels. PurchasingNet uses RightNow’s web self-service, knowledge base, email management, and call tracking to ensure that customers’ issues are handled quickly and effectively—and that managers have full visibility into both customers’ issues and contact center productivity. In this way, the company can drive costs down even as it continues to improve the customer experience.

Again, PurchasingNet’s use of a single system for all these departmental processes delivers significant benefits. Managers of the company’s professional services group, for example, can see the deal volume in the sales pipeline—so they can be fully prepared for any coming deluge of projects. The company can also quickly convene weekly meetings to review the status of all accounts. Instead of everyone showing up at the meeting with a bunch of separate spreadsheets and reports, all the information everyone needs can be pulled from and presented within RightNow. They’re even automating reports so they’re delivered into the Inbox of the appropriate stakeholders well in advance of their morning meetings—giving them plenty of time to review and prepare.

“RightNow makes it easy for us to quickly assign red, yellow, and green status to all of our accounts, so we can zero in on the issues that need attention immediately,” says Fielder. “It’s a great way to make sure we allocate our resources where they’re needed most.”

PurchasingNet provides a classic example of how RightNow’s comprehensive, highly customizable workflow, interaction management, and reporting capabilities can be effectively applied to streamline the end-to-end customer lifecycle and make the entire organization more responsive. The information gathered through RightNow is used to drive future product enhancements, and Fielder believes that RightNow's hosted CRM software solution is the cornerstone that will help them grow.

Fielder adds that it was more than just technology that caused PurchasingNet to select RightNow as its strategic CRM partner over other providers. It was also RightNow’s best practices expertise and project management skills.

“We didn’t just want to automate the processes we already had in place, and we didn’t want a solution that would force us to do things a certain way,” she says. “With RightNow, we got a partner that contributes a lot of very helpful ideas for process improvement—while also providing the technology we need to make the ideas a reality.”

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About PurchasingNet, Inc.

PurchasingNet, Inc. is the leading provider of eProcurement and ePayables Solutions to Financial Services, Media & Publishing, Professional Services, Manufacturing, Retail, and other industries. PurchasingNet, Inc. has over 1,400 clients and has been profitable 19 of the last 21 years.