Friend Communications Adds More Than $1 Million To Its Bottom Line With RightNow's CRM solutions
“ Our experience with RightNow gave us a tremendous amount of confidence in RightNow's ability to deliver true enterprise-class CRM solutions. ”
Goals
- Support growth in size and complexity of the business without increasing headcount
- Eliminate inefficiencies and errors resulting from “stovepipe” business systems
- Gain improved visibility into business performance and customer relationships
Achievements
- Improved workflow, reporting and integration across sales, marketing and service
- $720,000 in increased sales staff productivity
- $250,000 in incremental revenue gains through automated marketing campaigns
- $180,000 in customer service payroll savings
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Sales has to effectively work the leads
it gets from marketing, and customer service has to effectively support the
customers brought in by sales. Otherwise, the company won’t reap the full potential
value of every business opportunity that presents itself.
That’s why Friend Communications implemented RightNow's CRM solutions. With RightNow,
the RV industry’s leading eBusiness solutions provider is doing more than just
improving its marketing, sales and service processes—although those improvements
alone have yielded more than $1 million in bottom-line benefits. It’s taking
its business to a whole new level by transforming its marketing, sales and service
operations into a tightly linked chain.
“When customer-facing business processes are segregated by stovepiped departmental systems, it creates inefficiencies and opportunities for error,” says Deb Kohls, Friend’s VP of business development. “By providing a common environment for managing those processes, RightNow's CRM solutions eliminate these problems and allow us to make the most of all of our customer relationships.”
Kohls offers a prime example of how this works. Once a sales rep closes a deal with a customer, it’s up to Friend’s service team to get that customer up and running with their eBusiness solution. For obvious reasons, sales reps only get compensated for solutions that make it through this provisioning process and start delivering the functionality promised to the customer. So naturally sales reps want to keep a close eye on the service team’s provisioning processes—which is exactly what RightNow’s fully integrated CRM solutions allow them to do.
“Before we implemented RightNow, salespeople could easily get blind-sided by a service-related issue they knew nothing about,” explains Kohls. “Now, sales, service and marketing activities for each customer all reside in a common customer database. So everybody in our company has easy access to the same customer information in one integrated web application.”
Smarter Selling
Of course, in addition to integrating Friend’s sales, service and marketing operations, RightNow's CRM solutions have also significantly enhanced each of these departments in its own right. In fact, Friend had already had several years of success with RightNow's CRM solutions before adding the marketing and sales solutions. During that time, Friend reaped the full spectrum of benefits associated with RightNow’s acclaimed multi-channel contact center application: faster response times, consistent answers across all communication channels, enhanced visibility into top customer concerns, optimized web self-service, increased agent productivity and an enhanced customer experience.
The combination of self-service and increased productivity alone enabled Friend to keep its customer service headcount flat even as its business doubled in size. That payroll savings represents just under $180,000 annually.
“Our experience with RightNow gave us a tremendous amount of confidence in RightNow’s ability to deliver true enterprise-class solutions,” notes Kohls. “The outstanding reporting we were delivering to upper management during that time was particularly instrumental in helping us get the green-light to further deploy RightNow.”
The greatest immediate impact of the RightNow migration has been felt in sales force automation (SFA). Friend had previously been using what Kohls refers to as a “pseudo-SFA” tool, but it was not sufficiently robust for a company doubling its customer base annually. RightNow, on the other hand, was exactly what the company needed. With RightNow's CRM solutions, Friend salespeople can now manage their entire sales process from leads to closed sales. They can maintain pipelines, manage opportunities, log actions, schedule critical tasks, generate proposals and automate forecasting all in one easy-to-use application.
In fact, by increasing the productivity of Friend’s sales staff increased by approximately 40%, Kohls figures RightNow has directly more than $720,000 in additional revenue.
RightNow's CRM solutions are also making life easier for Friend’s sales managers. RightNow gives them full visibility into both the activities of their salespeople and the results those activities are generating. Executives can keep an eye on opportunities so they know what will close and when. And they get up-to-date sales forecasts on demand in order to make key business decisions.
One of Kohls’ favorite RightNow reports is one that allows a comparison of a salesperson’s forecast with the date of their last customer contact. “It’s helpful to manage productivity with results. When a sales forecast indicates 50 deals ready to close, even though they haven’t touched 30 of those accounts in the last 60 days, it helps to focus the sales effort and determine areas for improvement in a more targeted way” she explains. “By giving us visibility into those kinds of issues, RightNow is helping us to seriously improve our sales processes and forecasting accuracy.”
The Optimal Partner
Friend is also taking advantage of RightNow's CRM solutions to execute carefully targeted and highly automated marketing campaigns. RightNow makes it easy for Kohls and her team to create and test a variety of messages before rolling out campaigns to their full-intended audience. It also streamlines the management of all stages of those campaigns from initial contact to final fulfillment.
Kohls attributes approximately 18 percent of Friend’s new customers to campaigns enabled by RightNow. Based on the average annual revenue per account, this represents about $250,000 in incremental revenue.
RightNow's CRM solutions are also helping Friend increase sales to its installed base. Because the company offers a variety of services, there are plenty of opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell existing clients. With RightNow’s integrated CRM solutions, Friend can leverage the high-value information about customers captured by customer service to craft highly focused campaigns, and then seamlessly route those opportunities to sales as they emerge. Plus, with RightNow's CRM solutions, every department’s information is always accurate, because a data update made anywhere is reflected throughout the system.
Additionally, the company has opened the service console to their strategic business partners so that they can provide mutual support in a cohesive, seamless way. The partners are excited to share the information for a better consumer experience.
“Essentially, we’re taking what used to be several disparate tasks and integrating them into one seamless conversation with the customer,” declares Kohls. “It’s a much more effective and efficient way to do business.”
Kohls adds that RightNow’s on demand model further augments its value to Friend. “We provide a hosted service ourselves, so we understand the benefits of offloading the costs and hassles of technology ownership to a partner whose only job is to keep that specific technology up and running at all times,” she says.
She also gives high marks to RightNow as a total business partner. “Innovation is never easy, but RightNow has made it as painless as possible for us to break new ground,” she says. “They’re very responsive to our needs and have shown real commitment to helping us achieve our very ambitious business goals.”
Friend Communications Support Site | Friend Communications Homepage
About Friend Communications:
Friend Communications provides a complete web-enabled solution for RV parks to market and sell their services online. The company’s advanced technology connects consumers, businesses and partners within the leisure marketplace to enable increased visibility, new revenue opportunities, aggregated consumer information and improved operational efficiency.
Greg Gianforte