Shaklee Uses RightNow® To Optimize The Member Experience And Sustain Growth
“ RightNow is a very unique software company that has a lot to offer any organization that understands the importance of maintaining strong customer relationships in a highly competitive economy. ”
Goals
- Support quality brand with consistent, high-quality member interactions
- Reinforce relationship-based business model with a superior member experience
- Effectively leverage internet channels to sustain business growth
Achievements
- Improved responsiveness to more than 750,000 members across all touchpoints
- Campaign turnaround times reduced by as much as 90 percent
- Recognized by Gartner as a CRM Excellence Award finalist
- Able to proactively and cost-efficiently communicate with any targeted market segment
- Increased productivity and efficiency across multiple customer-facing business functions
Over the course of half a century, Shaklee grew into the largest natural nutrition company in the U.S. by building a quality brand and growing its direct-sales business model. But increasing competition and the rise of the internet posed a challenge to both its brand dominance and its ability to sustain the relationships that brought it to the top of its market.
By partnering with RightNow, the company has successfully met these challenges and is poised for continued market leadership. That’s because RightNow's CRM products help Shaklee maintain great relationships by delivering a consistently great experience across both its internet and traditional touch-points. RightNow's CRM products have also increased Shaklee’s productivity and efficiency across its marketing, sales and service operations.
“RightNow is an extremely adaptable solution that has helped us maintain close relationships with hundreds of thousands of people around the world,” says Shaklee CIO Ken Harris. “The business value of this technology is immense.”
Growing Through Strong Relationships
Shaklee’s business is built on the relationships between its more than 750,000 members and distributors. Shaklee members get discounts on products and receive useful nutrition and wellness information. Shaklee distributors are independent agents who sell Shaklee products and participate in a variety of loyalty programs. The longevity of these relationships helps set Shaklee apart from other nutritional supplement companies. In fact, the average active tenure of Shaklee members is more than six years.
The internet, however, posed a potential threat to these relationships. “In the past, people conducted business with each other face-to-face or on the phone,” says Peter Neels, Shaklee’s director of field support. “But now, they’re using the internet to get information, make buying decisions, and communicate with each other. So we needed a way to maintain high-touch relationships even as the use of online channels intensified.”
The RightNow call center software proved to be the ideal solution. With RightNow's CRM products, Shaklee can make it easy for both members and distributors to get the information they need from the company website. The company can manage email and phone communications with its contact center in a common manner. And the company can ensure that it continually improves its responsiveness across all channels.
For example, Shaklee used RightNow's call center software to implement topic-based routing that directs callers to subject-matter specialists based on the nature of their questions. This improves the quality of service that members and distributors receive, while also eliminating the inefficiencies that result when contact center staffers have to ask each other for answers. It also eliminates the phenomenon so common in contact centers where callers keep asking different staffers the same question until they get the answer they want.
Equally important, RightNow CRM products provide Shaklee managers with full visibility into what kinds of questions are coming into the company via phone, email and the web—so they can take appropriate action.
Fast, Easy Outbound Communication
In addition to enhancing Shaklee’s responsiveness to incoming questions, RightNow's call center software helped Shaklee to significantly improve its outbound communications. Before deploying RightNow's CRM producst, it was a struggle for Shaklee to pull together appropriate lists, create effective content, and transmit that content to large numbers of recipients. These struggles inhibited the company’s use of email as a proactive medium for marketing and relationship reinforcement.
With RightNow’s campaign management tools, that process has been totally streamlined. Shaklee can now flexibly select and combine appropriate recipients from multiple databases. It can accurately manage opt-out and opt-in requests. It can design attractive email messages with variable content and appropriate embedded hyperlinks. Using RightNow’s hosting environment, the company can blast out high volumes of email in roughly one-tenth the time it took when it used its own servers. And it can closely monitor the progress and success of each mailing.
Because RightNow's call center sotware makes it so easy to perform these tasks, Shaklee has been able to become much more proactive. It can send out periodic newsletters tailored for specific market niches—as well as “one-off” special promotions to take advantage of new market opportunities. The company can also quickly set up special “microsites” to support promotions with specially prepared web content.
In addition, RightNow’s analytics provide Shaklee with the granularity it needs to measure email marketing campaign effectiveness—including the tracking of delivery rates, abandonment rates, and click-throughs. It also allows them to track and compare those statistics with industry averages.
“Email is a very fast, convenient and cost-effective way to stay in touch with business leaders and members—if you do it right,” says John Cortez, Shaklee’s chief technology officer. “RightNow lets us do it right, without putting a big strain on our IT staff or forcing us to put anyone through extensive training.”
A Uniquely Engaged Call Center Software Partner
As valuable as RightNow’s call center software technology has been to Shaklee, Harris says he is even more impressed by the commitment RightNow has demonstrated to the company’s needs throughout the entire engagement. “Most software companies are very concerned about telling you how much their products can do for you up until you actually buy them,” he observes. “Then suddenly they don’t seem so concerned anymore.”
RightNow, in stark contrast, has remained closely engaged with Shaklee—going as far as to suggest ways the company can leverage its capabilities in ways neither Harris nor his team had even considered. This advice isn’t just driven by RightNow’s familiarity with its own CRM products. It’s also based on best-practices expertise gleaned from hundreds of other organizations facing the same customer relationship and customer experience challenges.
These best practices range from how to optimally manage a knowledge base to ways of driving tactical campaigns with market insight gleaned in the customer service contact center.
In fact, according to Harris, as a result of both the unique breadth of its software functionality and the added value of its consultative support, RightNow has greatly exceeded his original ROI projections and become one of Shaklee’s most strategic technology partners.
And as a result of their robust deployment Shaklee was recently recognized by Gartner as a CRM Excellence Award finalist—an award given to a company that most clearly demonstrates excellence in their customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives.
“In my 30 years as a CIO, I’ve never seen a company more committed to my success on an ongoing basis,” he declares. “RightNow is a very unique software company that has a lot to offer any organization that understands the importance of maintaining strong customer relationships in a highly competitive economy, where loyalty is something you have to earn one interaction at a time.”
Shaklee Corporation Support Site | Shaklee Corporation Homepage
Greg Gianforte