RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

RealtyTrac Leverages RightNow® To Support And Promote Rapid Business Growth

Goals

• Scale customer service operations to support rapid business growth
• Keep costs low to optimize profitability
• Deliver consistent service across phone, web, email and chat channels
• Maximize conversion of site visitors to paid customers

Achievements

• Extremely scalable and cost-efficient contact center
• Full visibility into service operations across all channels enables continuous improvement
• Ability to share high-value customer data and feedback with engineering, sales and other departments

One of the biggest challenges for growing companies is scaling their customer service capabilities. On one hand, it's important to expand those capabilities in order to keep customers satisfied. On the other hand, it's important to keep costs under control so that profits can remain healthy.

By implementing RightNow's call center solutions and best practices, RealtyTrac, which operates the largest online marketplace for foreclosure and pre-foreclosure properties, has successfully met this challenge. The company has been able to effectively support a customer base that is doubling to tripling annually, while avoiding large hiring increases that could have significantly cut into its operating margins.

In fact, beyond just optimizing the performance of its customer service organization, RealtyTrac has gone a step farther—and is now using the valuable information captured by its state-of-the-art customer service processes to help its site designers, salespeople, and marketers do a better job as well. The company's RightNow call center services implementation did not begin with such lofty goals. The first objective was simply to cope with the overwhelming volume of phone calls inundating its call center as the company grew. With a subscription price of $24.95 per month, CTO Michael Keane also needed to ensure that as many incidents as possible could be handled through low cost channels.

"Since we try to keep our customers' subscription rates as low as possible, the difference between profit and loss can be a couple of phone calls," he notes. "So we had to do everything in our power to automate and streamline support delivery without compromising the quality of the service we deliver."

RightNow's call center services offered Keane and RealtyTrac an ideal solution. As integrated call center solutions for phone, email, chat and the web, RightNow provided RealtyTrac a single platform for optimizing the quality and efficiency of communications with its customers across all channels. With its robust internet customer service capabilities, RightNow's call center solutions would also reduce RealtyTrac's telephone workload and associated costs. Plus, RightNow's call center services could be deployed as an on demand service—accelerating time-to-benefit and avoiding a wide range of IT costs.

RightNow's call center solutions immediately began to deliver substantial business benefits. With RightNow's robust call tracking functionality in place, RealtyTrac customer service manager Daren Blomquist could make sure that the several thousand calls they receive each month were being handled quickly and efficiently. Because RightNow's call center solutions are web-based applications, he could also have his outside call center contractors log their incidents in the same system.

At the same time, Blomquist and Keane focused on reducing call volume by using RightNow's call center solutions to make it as easy as possible for customers to find answers to their questions on the RealtyTrac site without personal assistance. A staggering 60,000 answers are viewed on the RealtyTrac site each month, providing immediate resolution to customer inquiries while containing costs.

RightNow's call center solutions also provided an easy way for customers to submit their questions to a RealtyTrac contact center agent right from the company's website. A variety of business rules are applied to incoming emails, the second most popular channel next to self-service, to ensure they are handled in a timely manner.

And, the live chat sofware turned out to be a particularly useful channel in RealtyTrac's RightNow-based contact center environment. Customers embraced its immediacy as they used the website, and RealtyTrac's agents found that they could use it to be tremendously efficient. "Chat offers the real-time feel of a phone call, while allowing the multi-tasking of email," explains Blomquist. "So our agents can handle as many as five customers at a time without making any of them wait for more than a few moments for their answers."

Both the live chat software and the web self-service solution also contributed to RealtyTrac's top-line growth by facilitating the conversion of site visitors into paid subscribers. A chat link on the site's checkout page proved to be especially popular. "It's difficult to precisely quantify conversion rates," says Keane. "But it's obvious that if you answer a customer's question at the point-of-purchase, you decrease the likelihood of that purchase being abandoned."

A common RightNow knowledge base is used across all communication channels. Customers get consistent, management-approved answers to their questions regardless of whether they're chatting with an agent online, speaking to someone on the phone or looking up the information on the website.

Just as important, RightNow call center services track all customer service activity across all channels in a common manner. This gives RealtyTrac full visibility into its interactions with customers.

For customer service, this means that all the information necessary to improve the performance of individual agents and the organization as a whole is available in one place. "We can see what information is useful and what needs to be refined," says Blomquist. "We can see where we're answering questions faster and where we're slowing down. All of this information is highly actionable and enables us to optimize both the quality of our service and the efficiency of our processes."

But RealtyTrac's RightNow call center solutions implementation is impacting its business well beyond the customer service team. The information and feedback captured in the process of answering customers' questions is also driving improvements elsewhere. For example, if customers are having trouble with a particular site feature, the company's technology team hears about it right away so they can make any necessary adjustments. "Customer service uses RightNow to capture customer feedback and create incident reports that our IT department can act on immediately," says Keane. "This gives us the capability to optimize the design and navigation of our site, based on what our customers want, on an ongoing basis."

Information is also shared regularly with sales, marketing and other areas of the business. Because feedback from all channels is captured in a common manner, relevant and comprehensive reports can quickly be generated and shared with appropriate managers to enhance operations.

Keane feels strongly that this leveraging of data captured by customer service is critical to the health of any company. "If you don't make business decisions based on what your customers are implicitly and explicitly telling you every day, you're essentially flying blind," he declares. "RightNow has done much more than just allow us to cost-effectively scale our customer service operations. It is helping to ensure that RealtyTrac continues to grow by placing our customers at the center of everything we do."

RealtyTrac Support Site | RealtyTrac Homepage

About RealtyTrac

RealtyTrac is the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, providing all the resources that home seekers, investors and realtors need to locate, evaluate and buy real estate properties at below market value. RealtyTrac offers its subscribers the largest database of pre-foreclosure and foreclosure data with more than 500,000 properties across the country, comprehensive property data, productivity tools and extensive professional resources. RealtyTrac hosts more than 2 million monthly unique visitors, and is the exclusive foreclosure data provider to MSN House & Home, Yahoo! Real Estate and Home Gain.