RightNow Helps Reader's Digest Optimize Quality And Cost-efficiency Of Managing Customer Interactions
Goals
- Cope more effectively with thousands of emails per week from subscribers and other customers
- Improve understanding of customer issues
- Optimize the customer's website experience
Achievements
- 50 percent reduction in call volume to toll-free number posted on the company's website
- Tens of thousands of questions answered automatically online every month
- Improved overall customer experience
- CRM products' functionality easily delivered via the web to internal users and outsourcers alike
Reader's Digest is one of the best-known and most trusted brands in publishing. To maintain that brand identity, it's vital to ensure the most positive possible customer experience across all communications channels. At the same time, like any other business, Reader's Digest must do everything it can to keep costs under control.
That's why RightNow's CRM products are a key component of Reader's Digest's overall customer service strategy.
Reader's Digest first discovered RightNow's CRM products in its quest to find a better way to handle email. The company had built a system using separate web forms for each of 12 topic categories and two IBM/Lotus Notes databases for each category (one for forms with comments, one for those without), but it had outlived its usefulness. Email volume continued to escalate as a growing number of the company's customers—including subscribers to its flagship magazine and its huge direct-mail base—began using the internet to ask questions about everything from subscription renewals to merchandise inquiries. Soon, the Notes databases filled with thousands of entries, significantly slowing response times. It became impossible to run reports across all the databases, which limited visibility into top customer concerns. Plus, without an effective way to time-stamp inquiries and track their progress, the Notes-based system did little to ensure the speed of replies.
RightNow clearly provided superior CRM products. RightNow made it easy to post topic-specific web forms, gather inquiries in a common high-performance database, closely manage workflow and generate reports that provided good insights into emerging trends. In addition, RightNow's web-based architecture made it easy for Reader's Digest to distribute functionality to both internal users and the multiple outsourced customer contact center providers the company engages to support its various businesses.
"Reader's Digest makes use of outsourcing to optimize the efficiency of our customer service operations," explains John Delgado, customer care manager for Reader's Digest. "RightNow's hosted solution gives us total flexibility to provide system access to our outsourcers regardless of their location or IT environments, since all they need are web access and a login."
In addition to solving its email problem, the Reader's Digest team soon saw that RightNow's CRM products would be a tremendous asset to their website. The customer service software made it easy for customer service personnel to post useful information on the site without the assistance of IT staff, and its unique search functions made it easy for customers to quickly find the answer to their questions online—even as the knowledge base grew in size and breadth.
"RightNow stood out because of its strength on both the customer-facing knowledge base and its email-and-content management back end," says Delgado. "The competing products we looked at were only good at one or the other."
Implementation went smoothly and results began to manifest right away. One surprise was the volume of calls to the toll-free 800 number posted on the Reader's Digest site quickly dropped by about 50 percent. Before RightNow, those calls had accounted for approximately seven percent of the calls received by the company's outsourced contact center every month. Within weeks, that percentage dropped to less than four percent.
Because Reader's Digest engages outsourced contact center providers, those reductions in call volume translated directly into lower outsourcing costs. "The savings we've achieved thus far have more than paid for our RightNow implementation," Delgado notes.
Reduced workloads also enable contact center staff to reply more quickly to customer questions as they come in. And, because the RightNow knowledge base addresses the bulk of the routine, repetitive questions customers ask, contact center staff can devote their time and skills to complex and/or account-related issues that truly require personal, one-on-one attention.
In addition to reducing inquiry volume, RightNow has also enhanced email management at Reader's Digest. With time-stamping and rules-based workflow automation, the company now replies to customers within one business day. And, in many cases, responses are sent out within 12 to 16 hours of receipt. RightNow's highly customizable business rules also enable Reader's Digest to balance workloads between different outsourcers. So if one contractor experiences processing delays, more traffic can be directed to another, less busy one.
These workload reductions are a direct result of RightNow's widely acclaimed self-service technology. Tens of thousands of Reader's Digest customers are now finding the answers to their questions online. And only a small percentage of those searching the company's RightNow-powered knowledge base have to escalate their question to a contact center agent via the site's web forms.
"Our strategy is to drive interactions to the communication channel that is most appropriate for the customer and most cost-effective for us," says Delgado. "By enhancing both our web and email channels, RightNow has been a powerful technology enabler for this strategy."
Reader's Digest's success has been independently verified by the Customer Respect Group, which ranked the company among the highest in the publishing industry for the quality of its customer service.
Delgado, in turn, gives RightNow high marks for its own customer service. "We have never had a bad customer experience with RightNow in all the years we've been working with them," he declares. "They're easy to work with, highly responsive, and—as the free Tune-Up sessions they give us every six months so clearly demonstrate—have shown a real ongoing commitment to helping us continuously improve our performance."
Reader's Digest Support Site | Reader's Digest Homepage
About Reader's Digest
The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. is a $2.5 billion diversified publishing and direct-marketing corporation producing and distributing magazines, books, music, videos and other products. Reader's Digest does business in all parts of the world. Its flagship publication, Reader's Digest, is the world's most widely read magazine, reaching nearly 100 million readers worldwide each month. The company's business is administered in four groups: International, North America, Consumer Business Services and QSP.
Related Information
Scan the items below for the information you want next. You can place any of these items in your Briefcase, or click the link to read it immediately.
-
Video: A RightNow® world: organizations ponder where they’d be without RightNow Video
Listen as clients such as Black & Decker, Electronic Arts, and Motorola weigh in on where their organizations would be without RightNow.
-
Video: Outservicing the Competition with RightNow CX Video
What do Continental Tire, eHarmony, and Orbitz have in common?
-
Video: 8 Steps to Great Customer Experiences: the Customer’s Perspective Video
Listen to Electronic Arts, Shaklee, and various other RightNow clients talk about how RightNow's 8 Steps are helping them deliver superior customer experiences.
-
Video: Toyota Video
Toyota moves the customer experience forward with RightNow.
-
Research & Analysis: RightNow's 4th Annual Customer Experience Impact Report
This survey confirmed, again, that consumers are challenging companies to sit up and take notice; and if they aren’t willing to care for their customers, they will go elsewhere.
-
Webcast On Demand: Ten Secrets for Successful Customer Service Q4 2008
To gain and retain customers today your service must be excellent. But you also need to manage costs. What are the secrets to overcoming these challenges?
Greg Gianforte