Continental Tire Gains 484 Percent Annual ROI And Improved Customer Experience Using RightNow®
Goals
- Leverage the internet as a customer service communication channel
- Create a fully integrated phone/email/web contact center
- Reduce operational costs
Achievements
- 40 percent fewer phone calls and 90 percent reduction in emails
- Annualized savings of more than $200,000
- Competitively superior customer service across all channels
- Self-service rate of over 97 percent
Most companies are satisfied if they break even on their technology investments. But Continental Tire is saving almost five times what it cost to deploy RightNow in labor reductions alone—resulting in a 484 percent annual return on investment. At the same time, the company is delivering a level of service across its phone, email and web channels that drives real competitive advantages.
Continental Tire's labor savings have resulted from two primary factors. First, the company is now able to answer a tremendous number of customer questions via the web. In one year its RightNow knowledge base handled over 78,000 sessions, with less than three percent of those sessions requiring escalation to a customer service agent. That has reduced call volume by about 40 percent and email volume by about 90 percent.
Second, RightNow enabled Continental Tire to create a "blended" contact center where agents can handle both phone and email inquiries—and view customer contact histories across all channels from a single console. This has increased agent efficiency and enhanced the customer experience.
As a result, Continental has been able to reduce its agent headcount by 25 percent, providing an annual savings in excess of $200,000, according to consumer relations supervisor Karen Duncan.
Duncan notes that RightNow is a great tool for boosting agent productivity—especially for a company like hers that sells its products through local dealers. Unlike companies that sell directly to consumers, companies that sell through distributors don't have traditional customer databases. So they only pick up information about individual customers in bits and pieces as those customers interact with the company in various ways. "What's great about RightNow is that our agents can quickly pinpoint a customer's history even if all they've done is emailed us once," she explains. "That's a very powerful capability."
It also comes in handy if someone writes a letter to the CEO. "If he asks us to pull up our history of contact with that customer, we can do it in a matter of minutes instead of hours," she says. "Those kinds of time savings really add up."
In addition to improving the customer experience, Continental Tire's RightNow CRM system also provides the company with great insight into customers' top concerns—insights that it might not otherwise be able to get. Duncan can generate a wide range of reports about customer interactions and pass them on to quality management, marketing and other departments.
The RightNow knowledge base is also useful in helping the company cope with special events that sometimes create major spikes in customer communications activity. For example, when the company recently announced its new ContiExtreme tire, consumer interest went through the roof. "Without RightNow, we would have been swamped with questions from customers about where and when they could get the tire," Duncan recalls. "RightNow also made it clear that there was real grass-roots demand for the tire—and that our dealers weren't just clamoring for shipments because they wanted to make sure they had more than enough stock on hand."
The consistency-of-response that RightNow's CRM system enables across all channels is important to Continental Tire from a legal point of view. The tire industry is very safety-conscious, so it's important to answer technical questions clearly and accurately. By providing a common knowledge base for phone, email and the web, RightNow enables Continental Tire to reply to customers' questions with precise answers that have been approved by the company's technical and legal experts.
"If you answer questions without imposing a certain degree of discipline, you expose yourself to potentially significant liabilities," explains Duncan. "RightNow allows us to minimize that risk by crafting clear and accurate responses delivered via Web, email and phone."
Duncan points out that the ability to deliver a superior customer experience does more than just help the company sell more tires. It also strengthens the company's position with the automakers that account for such a large percentage of the company's business. "A Ford or a GM dealer wants to know that you can take good care of their customers," says Duncan. "RightNow is an important part of the total package we present, which demonstrates we are serious about customer care."
Continental Tire's RightNow-based system is also strengthening its relationships with its distributors across North America. "We're answering a lot of questions that their customers might otherwise ask them," Duncan explains. "Plus, when their retail business is closed for the day, the self-service knowledge base is still there to assist our shared customer."
Duncan is enthusiastic about RightNow's hosted delivery model. "We got all the software functionality we needed without calling on our already overworked IT people," she says. "Plus, we didn't lay a lot of cash out upfront before experiencing the business benefits the software promised."
Thanks to RightNow, Continental Tire is operating more efficiently and has a much closer relationship with its customers. That relationship is strengthening the brand, increasing sales and making Continental Tire a more attractive business partner for automakers and distributors alike. "Customers want to use a combination of the Web, email and phone to do business with us," says Duncan. "RightNow provides a superb platform for doing just that."
Continental Tire-NA Support Site | Continental Tire-NA Homepage
About Continental Tire
Continental Tire North America, Inc. (CTNA, formerly Continental General Tire) is a subsidiary of Continental AG, the fourth largest tire manufacturer in the world. CTNA supplies passenger car tires to original equipment customers including BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen. CTNA also sells its tires through a worldwide distribution channel
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