Raymarine Drives Customer Loyalty With RightNow-powered Customer Experience Initiative
Goals
- Provide optimized customer experience to support brand and market leadership
- Generate “pull” through multiple distribution channels
- Minimize total contact center costs
- Maximize lifetime value of high-volume customers
Achievements
- 240 percent increase in product registration enables direct dialog with the customer
- 67 percent reduction in email response times within four months of implementation
- 95 percent web self-service rate, giving customers information when and how they want it
- Driving effective loyalty programs with response rates as high as 70 percent
If you’re operating in a high-growth market, you can make a lot of mistakes and still succeed. But when your overall market is mature, you need a great strategy and flawless execution to grow your business.
And global marine electronics leader Raymarine has struck the right balance. Raymarine continues to maintain a laser-focus on aggressively building its brand and its relationships with its customers to drive customer loyalty. And RightNow's CRM products has played a strategic role in enabling it to do so.
“Brand differentiation is critical for grabbing market share from your competitors, and a superior customer experience is critical for achieving that brand differentiation,” says Jim Hands, Raymarine’s senior marketing manager. “With RightNow, we’ve been able deliver that superior customer experience—and do it cost-efficiently.”
Generating Channel “Pull”
It’s particularly important for Raymarine to instill brand loyalty in its customers, because the company sells through a large worldwide network of dealers and distributors. So when a customer walks into a store, Raymarine needs that customer to already be predisposed to buy a Raymarine product. Otherwise, the dealer could easily sell them something from a competitor.
Raymarine has addressed this challenge through its “InsiderVIP” customer loyalty program. This program gives customers an incentive to register their products and enter into a direct relationship with Raymarine by offering them a variety of web and email content of interest to boating and fishing enthusiasts. RightNow’s marketing automation functionality makes it easy for the company to maintain opt-in/opt-out lists, design content, execute mailings, and track deliverability.
The program has been exceptionally effective, driving a 240 percent increase in product registrations—deepening the pool of customers with which Raymarine can proactively interact.
Raymarine also incorporates targeted promotions into its InsiderVIP content. With RightNow's CRM products, these promotions can be targeted based on anything from the type of product the customer currently uses to the size of the customer’s boat.
In addition, Raymarine uses RightNow's CRM products to manage special InsiderVIP events that it holds at local boat shows—driving response rates as high as 70 percent. RightNow automates the entire process of selecting recipients by zip code, sending out invitations, receiving and responding to invitation acceptances, sending out reminders immediately before the event, and following up with customers afterwards.
Raymarine has further taken advantage of RightNow's feedback management software to survey its customer base about products, services, and policies. RightNow's CRM products enable Hands and his team to quickly create surveys, distribute them to appropriate customer segments, and assess the results.
“RightNow has enabled us to enter into an electronic dialog with our customers, so that we can better understand their needs and they can better understand what we have to offer,” says Hands. “And we’ve been able to do all this without having to add staff.”
Customer-satisfying Service Across All Channels
Like many other companies, Raymarine first became a RightNow customer because of an immediate pain-point: slow, ineffective handling of customer email. Hundreds of messages were coming in every week, and the company had no effective way to handle them. As a result, customers sometimes had to wait a week before getting a reply.
RightNow created a demo site for Hands and his team, which enabled them to become familiar with the solution and get a clear picture of how it would improve customer service. The customized working demo also helped them sell upper management on the initiative.
Raymarine deployed RightNow in the midst of its peak summer season. Despite the intensity of the situation, the system was quickly up and running. Hands and his team pulled together about 100 knowledge items from existing documents to seed the knowledge base. The knowledge base grew rapidly to more than 600 items as RightNow allowed new answers to be authored as part of existing support processes.
“With RightNow, we were able put three or four of our customer service representatives in charge of content—instead of creating dedicated authoring staff,” Hands recalls. “That's a huge productivity dividend that allowed us to cost-effectively transform our site into a highly effective self-service resource for our customers.”
In fact, about 95 percent of the customers who use Raymarine’s self-service knowledge base find what they need without having to submit a question to the company’s support staff. This 24/7 resource gives customers access to information on their time and on their terms. It also helps keep email volume down, even as the company continues to grow. At the same time, RightNow’s email management software system capabilities enable Raymarine to handle this remaining volume with tremendous efficiency.
That’s why, within four months of implementing RightNow's email management software system, Raymarine’s email response times dropped from six days to 48 hours. Today, most customers get a reply within 30 minutes.
Raymarine also tracks incoming phone calls with RightNow, so contact center staff can quickly see if the customer they’re talking to on the phone has previously sent an email about the same issue. This saves them time, since they don’t have to go over information that the customer has already received. And it spares customers the aggravation of having to repeat themselves.
The Right Partner
Raymarine has benefited significantly from RightNow’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. The SaaS model enabled the company to deploy sophisticated software functionality without having to take on the costs and management burdens that come with ownership of enterprise applications and associated IT infrastructure. This model also allowed Raymarine to move forward with its customer experience efforts one stage at a time—instead of having to take on a mammoth project all at once.
Hands has found the upgrade process especially smooth. “RightNow really does all the heavy lifting,” he notes. “We just tell them what we want to do and when we want to do it.”
He adds that he and his team have been able to learn a lot about how to best use RightNow by seeing how RightNow itself does things. “When it comes to things like figuring out how to organize our knowledge base or phrase our opt-in/opt-out question, we always look at how RightNow has done it,” he admits. “After all, they’ve been doing this stuff longer than anyone else.”
Ultimately, Hands notes, it’s the quality of RightNow’s own customer experience that makes it such an ideal partner for Raymarine. “They really practice what they preach,” he says. “They’re responsive to our needs, they provide us with great service, and they’ve developed a solution that really delivers results.”
Raymarine Support Site | Raymarine Homepage
About Raymarine
Based in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Raymarine is a world leader in marine electronics. The company develops and manufactures the most comprehensive range of electronic equipment for the recreational boating and light commercial marine markets—including radar, navigation aids, instruments, fishfinders, communications, software, and systems. Designed for high performance and ease of use, these award-winning products are available through a global network of dealers and distributors.
Greg Gianforte