Ben & Jerry's Celebrates Years Of Customer Service Excellence With RightNow®
Goals
- Backlog of 6,000 emails
- Keep customer service costs low
- Support strong brand identity with easy access to company information
Achievements
- 90 percent email reduction and elimination of email backlog
- Knowledge base efficiency rate of 99 percent
- Excellent communication with customers
Ben & Jerry's built its ice cream empire on an irresistible product and a unique, consumer-friendly brand. But as use of the internet grew, it faced a customer service crisis. Customers were flocking to the company website and flooding the Consumer Affairs department with emails. At one point, the company had a backlog of 6,000 emails—which could take as long as four months to reply to!
Fortunately, RightNow had the solution. In fact, because so many customer questions pertained to common issues, RightNow's self-service knowledge base was a perfect fit for Ben & Jerry's site. The company came up with about 200 answers that customers could easily search through by using keywords or browsing categories. With these answers available online, email volume quickly dropped by 90 percent. Within a month, Ben & Jerry's was responding to the remaining trickle of emails in two days or less.
That was several years ago. And Ben & Jerry's is still using RightNow to answer customers' questions automatically via the web. In fact, the company has done such a good job of refining its online knowledge base that over 99 percent of people who visit the site find their answers without using the Ask-a-Question feature.
"RightNow makes it possible for us to interact with a huge number of people via the web, enabling us to deliver 'high-touch' service with a staff of just four people," says market research and consumer services manager Lucas Jenson. "It also provides an excellent information reference for our staff, who can quickly look up the answers to questions they don't know."
Jenson has become a huge fan of RightNow's hosting model over the years. "The great thing about hosting is that all the IT mechanics and housekeeping are taken care of for you," he says. "You get the benefits of the solution without any of the headaches."
RightNow has also been very useful in dealing with questions that might otherwise create a lot of work for Jenson's team—ranging from the ingredients used in its ice cream to special company promotions like Free Cone Day. "It's great to be able to post an answer on the site so we don't have to field thousands of phone calls or emails," says Jenson.
Lisa Sholk, consumer services coordinator at Ben & Jerry's, adds that RightNow has been extremely helpful in helping her to further refine her company's self-service implementation. During a free application Tune Up, for example, she received the simple but valuable tip to remove "ice cream" from customers' keyword searches. "Most of our answers obviously contain the words 'ice cream,'" she explains. "So by filtering those words out of the searches, we can return result sets that are much more on-target."
The fact that Ben & Jerry's is still able to handle its customer communications with only four people after all this time—and through substantial annual business growth—illustrates how effective a customer service solution RightNow has been. Just as important, the fact that the business relationship is still going strong is a great indicator of how responsive and reliable a partner RightNow has been.
"RightNow has been an absolute pleasure to work with," says Jenson. "I wish every vendor would deliver as much value and be as focused on our needs as they have."
Ben and Jerrys Ice Cream Support Site | Ben and Jerrys Ice Cream Homepage
About Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Factory (Unilever)
Ben and Jerry's is owned by Unilever Ice Cream North America. They are operating under the name Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Factory. This Vermont-based manufacturer of ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbet, was founded in 1978 in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, by childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. They soon became popular for their innovative flavors, made from fresh Vermont milk and cream. The company currently distributes ice cream, low fat ice cream, frozen yogurt, sorbet and novelty products nationwide as well as in selected foreign countries in supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, franchised Ben & Jerry's scoop shops, restaurants and other venues.
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