RightNow – On Demand CX Software

RightNow® helps cost-efficiently and effectively market to, sell to, and service demanding healthcare customers

Briggs Corporation markets, sells and services its demanding healthcare provider customers more effectively and cost-efficiently with RightNow

Goals:

• Optimize revenue in the face of intense competition
• Ensure retention of and maximize sales into existing accounts
• Control costs for marketing, sales and customer service
• Achieve clear differentiation in a commoditized market
  

Achievements:

• 10% increase in outbound phone sales productivity
• 25-40% response rates for rapidly executed email campaigns
• 38% improvement in first-call resolution rate
• Greater overall visibility into and responsiveness to customers’ needs

Marketing is a tough challenge in any business. And every company wants to improve its sales performance. Most would like to bring down their customer service costs too, especially if they could improve the quality of that service at the same time.

Remarkably, healthcare products supplier Briggs Corporation has managed to do all three. Just as important, the company has tightly linked these formerly siloed business processes in order to achieve higher per-account revenue and deliver a more consistently satisfying and personalized customer experience across all of its frontline touch-points.

The catalyst for this impressive transformation has been RightNow.

“RightNow has enabled Briggs to better understand and respond to the needs of our customers with every interaction,” declares Doug Dostal, Briggs’ VP of IT and eBusiness. “The result is that we are better able to grow our business and differentiate our brand in a market that is both highly competitive and highly commoditized.”

Overhauling the CRM environment to address business challenges

Briggs serves a wide range of healthcare buyers—including service providers, purchasing aggregators, and independent dealers—with a wide range of products. These products fall into two main categories: commodities (such as syringes and feedings aids) and higher-end business support solutions for treatment documentation and regulatory compliance.

The nature of Briggs’ relationship with these buyers has been changing significantly in recent years. Before the advent of managed care, buyers tended to be much less disciplined in their purchasing habits. In fact, in some cases, the more they spent the more they would be reimbursed.

Today, on the other hand, budgets are very tight and buyers have to be extremely precise in mapping their purchases to their short-term needs. Competition for these increasingly limited purchasing dollars has also become much more intense. It is therefore more important than ever for Briggs to know exactly what its customers need as close as possible to the moment they need it—and to differentiate themselves from competitors who are likely offering similar products at a similar price.

Prior to implementing RightNow, Briggs used a combination of Siebel and some homegrown applications to manage its customer relationships. But this combination proved to be inadequate for the serious challenges the company faced. “We were paying too much and getting too little with Siebel,” Dostal recalls. “So we knew we were going to have to do something different in terms of technology if we were going to achieve our business goals.”

After evaluating a variety of vendors—including Salesforce.com, Siebel and Pivotal—Dostal and his team decided on RightNow as their technology partner. “It wasn’t just that the functionality of RightNow’s software was better suited to our needs,” explains Dostal. “It was also their exceptional responsiveness to our pre-sales requests and our general sense that they would be a better cultural fit for us. RightNow demonstrated by example that they knew what a competitively differentiated customer experience was all about.”

Using automation to rapidly execute precise, effective marketing campaigns

Briggs is using RightNow’s marketing capabilities in several ways. Like many companies, Briggs often wants to offer special promotions and incentives to specific segments of its customer and prospect databases. Because RightNow makes it easy to design and deliver offers to any target, Briggs can execute a much larger number of campaigns than it could in the past. This ease-of-execution and increased frequency also makes it more practical for Briggs to do campaigns aimed at smaller, more focused groups of recipients. So, for example, if the company picks up two hundred names from a trade show, it can quickly and inexpensively respond with an offer specifically aimed at those show attendees.

These inexpensive, tightly focused “mini-campaigns” have enabled Briggs to achieve response rates of 25 to 40 percent.

Briggs is also using RightNow to manage its sophisticated newsletter program. This program segments the company’s database in order to appropriately tailor newsletter content to the specific interests and business challenges of its diverse customers. As a result, customers regularly receive useful information from Briggs without having to sort through a lot of clutter.

The newsletter also serves as an extremely valuable form of market research. By tracking the products and topics that generate the most click-throughs, Briggs can quickly pinpoint its customers’ “hot button” issues. This insight can then be used to improve the effectiveness of its printed materials and its other marketing activities—and to further ensure that customers aren’t bothered with irrelevant messages.

“RightNow empowers us to deliver tailored messages to target audiences with very little effort—and to see exactly who responded to what,” says Dostal. “In fact, if we’re not careful, we can actually generate more leads than our sales staff can handle.”

Building a lean, mean selling machine

RightNow enabled Briggs to address several of its key sales challenges as well. One of the most crucial of those challenges was one which every company selling commodity products faces: It is simply not cost-effective to spend too much time getting orders where there’s not a lot of margin. That’s why it’s important to keep outbound sales calls short and effective.

RightNow addresses this challenge by putting the information Briggs’ sales reps need to get the most out of each call right at their fingertips. They can quickly zero in on each customer’s purchase history and ask about those particular items that most likely need to be replenished. They can also refer to any notes that they or anyone else has made on that customer’s record. As a result, salesperson productivity has gone up an average of 10% across the board.

With 60,000 active accounts, it’s also a big challenge for Briggs to make sure sales reps contact each customer with the appropriate frequency. Of course, their ability to make more calls every day helps increase the frequency with which they contact all their accounts. But, by applying appropriate business rules, Briggs has also been able to better prioritize each rep’s daily call list. This way, accounts that represent greater revenue, higher margins, and/or more urgent opportunities get called first.

And when reps call, they’re fully equipped with the information to address and even anticipate each customer’s specific needs. So customers get personalized attention and care—even as Briggs boosts sales productivity.

“RightNow has been very well-accepted by our sales team and has given them the insight they need to treat every customer as an individual,” Dostal says. “At the same time, because of the efficiencies RightNow creates, some of our reps are able to handle upwards of 2,500 accounts.”

More responsive service, lower operating costs

Briggs is also using RightNow in its contact center technology to optimize service levels and reduce costs. All calls and emails are handled within RightNow, which is also integrated with the company’s JD Edwards ERP system to ensure the consistency of all customer record data. In addition, RightNow is used internally for the company’s IT help desk.

The instant availability of all relevant customer information makes it easier for Briggs’ staff to quickly address both external and internal customer issues. This has led to a 38% improvement in the company’s first call resolution rate—which means customers are getting faster answers to their questions, even as Briggs reduces its costs.

Briggs has taken the additional step of putting RightNow on its distribution floor—so if a customer calls at the last minute to add more items to an active order, a notification pops up to tell the workers there to add the item. This ensures that the customer gets the item as quickly as possible, while saving Briggs the cost of sending another shipment.

The fact that the service, sales, and marketing functionality of RightNow are all incorporated into a single workflow environment provides many benefits to Briggs and its customers. For example, if a customer calls service to ask for a sample, it’s easy for the service staffer to let the appropriate salesperson know that there might be an opportunity at that account. Conversely, before making a call, salespeople can easily check to see if a customer has any service issues outstanding. This allows them to avoid being blindsided by such problems as they try to make a sale.

Customers benefit because they get more personalized and responsive treatment every time they interact with Briggs. They don’t have to repeat themselves or explain a whole lot, because every frontline Briggs employee has access to their RightNow record and can update it as necessary.

Briggs was supported in its various customizations by RightNow professional customer experience management services, which has provided a wealth of customer experience expertise, as well as critical technical assistance.

“RightNow as an organization has been a powerful change agent for Briggs Corporation,” says Dostal. “Their technology and their insight have helped us achieve significant quantifiable near-term ROI while simultaneously enabling us to sustain our market leadership over the long haul by treating our customers much better than any of our competitors can.”

About Briggs Corporation:

For over 50 years, privately-held Briggs Corporation has been a leading supplier to providers in long-term care, assisted living, home health agencies, physician clinics, and hospitals. With approximately 250 employees and distribution centers in five U.S. locations, Briggs serves more than 40,000 health care providers and offers more than 9,000 different products including documentation, staff training, patient and family education, operational resources, medical products, charting and record storage, billing and coding, clinical references, and signage and artwork.

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