Audible.com Maximizes Growth, Profitability And Customer Loyalty With RightNow
Goals
- Implement a contact center solution without consuming inordinate capital or staff resources
- Support aggressive business growth while minimizing headcount growth
- Maximize visibility into customer needs and issues to ensure satisfaction and loyalty
Achievements
- Superior customer service provided across all communication channels
- Staff growth held to just 15 percent during 90 percent business growth
- Actionable customer insights provided to all areas of the business
Customer loyalty is essential to any business that relies heavily on repeat transactions. And if that business sells a technology-based product, it must do two things in particular to ensure loyalty: 1) make its product easy to use and 2) provide great technical support. These goals are especially critical in consumer markets, since customers may not be technologically savvy.
It's also important to keep the cost of providing this great customer experience low. Otherwise, rising revenue will quickly be consumed by rising overhead.
The case of Audible.com dramatically illustrates how, with the help of RightNow, a consumer technology company can successfully satisfy its customers while also minimizing its customer care-related expenses. By building and maintaining strong relationships with its customers, Audible.com has been able to grow its business by 90 percent annually. Yet, at the same time, the company was initially able to avoid increasing customer service headcount for two years.
Audible.com has accomplished this by taking full advantage of RightNow's powerful on demand CRM technology. With RightNow, Audible.com has optimized both the quality of its interactions with customers across all of its communication channels and the effectiveness with which it leverages the captured customer information. The company is thus able to immediately respond to any problem its customers may encounter, while at the same time continuously improving its understanding of their wants and needs.
"RightNow is an extremely effective solution for listening and talking to our customers," says Will Lopes, Audible.com's vice president and general manager. "It has been of enormous strategic value to our company as we've moved aggressively to grow our customer base while controlling costs."
High-value On Demand Solutions
Lopes deployed RightNow to replace another third-party implementation that was no longer meeting Audible.com's needs. "We were using a fairly limited help desk application that was rather slow, in addition to being antiquated," says Lopes. "We knew we needed a state-of-the-art platform that would give us total control and visibility across all communication channels—including phone, email and the web."
The growth of Audible.com's business was putting intense pressure on Lopes to revamp the company's service operation. While many of the company's first-wave customers were technology enthusiasts, its growth was bringing it many users who were less digitally savvy. The mounting volume of questions threatened to overwhelm Lopes' staff. And he didn't want to simply throw more headcount at the problem.
RightNow boosted the efficiency of Audible.com's service operations in several ways. For one thing, service reps were empowered with a complete view of each customer's entire service history. That helped them provide faster and much more personalized service. "It's very useful to see if the customer you're speaking to has had the same problem before and/or if they currently have any other outstanding service issues," explains Lopes. "If your customer perceives that you're fully aware of who they are and what they need, it more than makes up for the fact that they may be experiencing a problem."
RightNow also helps Audible.com expedite answers by automating escalation and other workflows. Business rules such as response-time thresholds ensure that no question goes unanswered for too long.
Because the technology environment in which Audible.com operates seems to evolve on a daily basis, Lopes also finds RightNow's dynamic approach to knowledge base management very valuable. "We constantly have to update the information we're providing to customers," says Lopes. "RightNow enables us to instantly and easily update both our website and our internal knowledge base with a single action."
The Customer Feedback Loop
In addition to boosting the efficiency of Audible.com's service operations, RightNow is providing company executives and managers with tremendous insight into its customers' needs and wants. Because RightNow captures information about every customer interaction, it can provide comprehensive reports about the issues dominating those interactions. These reports are shared with managers across the company on a regular basis, so they can quickly discover and resolve emerging problems.
Such problems are typically addressed in two stages. First, as a short-term fix, an appropriate addition is quickly made to the company's online knowledge base. This provides an immediate answer for customers anywhere in the world 24 hours a day, while at the same time eliminating a certain volume of calls and emails that would otherwise be added to the service rep workload.
Meanwhile, the company can solve the underlying problem itself—whether it's a compatibility issue with some third-party CD burning software or a flaw in a content file.
"RightNow has saved us a lot of money by acting as an early warning system for problems that are impacting the customer experience," Lopes declares.
RightNow also enables Lopes to directly survey Audible.com's customers about their satisfaction with the company. "RightNow's closed-incident surveys are extremely valuable to me because they tell me how our customers view us," he says. "That's information you absolutely must have if you're going to maximize customer loyalty."
In addition to tracking customers' perceptions about Audible.com's service, RightNow provides Lopes with the reports he needs to track the performance of both individual service reps and the service team as a whole. After working with an outsourced call center for a while, he has learned an important lesson about service metrics. "A lot of contact center managers will just measure their staff on how quickly they can resolve problems and how many incidents they can handle a day," he observes. "But speed isn't much use if you're not giving clear, useful information to the customer—so you have to focus on the quality of your interactions as well."
Based on the success of its initial deployment, Audible.com is extending its RightNow implementation to support its entries into the French and German markets. Lopes adds that RightNow has been an extremely responsive business partner throughout the engagement, and that the on demand CRM model has augmented Audible.com's ROI by eliminating the costs and hassles of technology ownership.
"RightNow has cracked the code for growth-mode companies like Audible.com that need to keep customers happy but don't want to create massive IT overhead," says Lopes. "We are very pleased with the results we've achieved so far and see RightNow as a strategic technology partner for our company as we continue to expand our market footprint."
Audible.com Support Site | Audible.com Homepage
About Audible.com
Audible is the internet’s largest and most diverse providers of premium spoken audio content for playback on personal computers and mobile devices. Founded in 1995, Audible allows customers to take better advantage of their commute, travel and desktop computer time by delivering premium information and entertainment when their eyes are busy but their minds are free. Audible’s content partners include more than 175 leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, magazine and newspaper publishers, business information providers, and educational and cultural institutions.
Greg Gianforte