Air New Zealand Customers Find Answers Fast With RightNow
Goals
- Improve access to complex information on Air New Zealand's website
- Reduce high demand on Air Points and Reservations call centers by encouraging customers to service themselves online
Achievements
- Email enquiries across call centers have reduced on average by 55 percent since RightNow's implementation
- Calls relating to frequent-flyer program reduced by 56 percent since the RightNow deployment
- Improved performance management of customer service staff
Air New Zealand Customers Find Answers Fast With RightNow
Air New Zealand, New Zealand's national carrier, continually looks for ways to improve customer care. The airline realized that many of the calls and email traffic generated via the website related to issues of a repetitive nature. For example, a high proportion of enquiries were about the airline's frequent-flyer program. Air New Zealand also acknowledged that information on its site could be better organized for easier access for both leisure and business travelers.
Several years ago, Air New Zealand conducted a review of available software solutions to help improve its customer service via the web. After reviewing several solutions, Air New Zealand selected RightNow's on demand CRM software system. RightNow turned out to be a decision which paid-off rapidly. RightNow handled in excess of 10,000 customer queries online each day during an extraordinarily hectic time for the airline, as well as delivering fast ROI in a number of other ways. Based on the success they experienced in Australia with the RightNow solution, the airline decided to implement RightNow for their New Zealand operations.
A Fast And Smooth Take-off Delivers Results Quickly
According to Yvonne Lim, Air New Zealand's e-product manager - commercial, the implementation process was simple, and RightNow's on demand CRM software system delivered results immediately. "The support and training from RightNow during the implementation phase was fantastic. The CRM system is so simple to implement that we configured it ourselves with guidance from the RightNow project manager," said Yvonne Lim. "We were getting results from RightNow as soon as we went live with the solution."
Initially, Air New Zealand seeded its database with over 200 question and answer pairs. Included in these were answers relating to areas of common enquiry, such as the frequent-flyer program and airfares.
"Since the RightNow implementation, email enquiries relating to the frequent -flyer program are down by 56 percent. This result was attributable to RightNow as our customers began to find the answers themselves on our site (www.airnz.co.nz) using the self-learning knowledge base. On average, emails across our three core email service centers have reduced by 55 percent as access to this information online dramatically improved through the RightNow implementation," said Yvonne Lim.
RightNow Supports Air New Zealand With Staff Training
An additional. and unexpected benefit of Air New Zealand's implementation of the RightNow CRM solution has been improved staff training. According to Yvonne Lim, "With RightNow's CRM solution, we're finding that coaching our staff on handling inquiries is simplified. Previously it was difficult to accurately assess the performance of our staff in handling email enquiries from customers. Now we have the capability to review how they are responding to customers, identify knowledge gaps, or how they can improve the tone of their responses and even measure staff productivity and effectiveness. This aspect of RightNow is valuable to us, as it means we can continue to find ways of improving the customer service that we offer our customers. This will improve customer satisfaction over the longer term."
Future Plans
Air New Zealand is very satisfied with the success of the RightNow implementation and has plans to expand its use in most customer-facing parts of the business. The next stage will be to implement RightNow in offshore markets and investigate the implementation of RightNow's live chat functionality for specific customer segments, such as its corporate clients. Air New Zealand also plans to use RightNow's customer feedback survey tool to measure customer satisfaction.
"The travel industry has been recognized as an early adopter in e-business initiatives. Air New Zealand is committed to improving access to information and ease of use with our diverse and sophisticated customer-base who'd prefer to research travel, prices and destinations when it suits them online. We're pleased to have found RightNow, which makes life online better for our customers and is an invaluable tool for our customer service staff and management," said Yvonne Lim.
Air New Zealand Support Site | Air New Zealand Homepage
About Air New Zealand
Air New Zealand Limited is an international and domestic airline group which provides air passenger and cargo transport services to, from and within New Zealand, Australia and the South West Pacific.
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