Intermec’s RightNow-powered Global Support System Yields Significant Competitive Advantages
Goals
- Manage an abundance of ever-changing technical knowledge across a global organization
- Develop global consistency in support processes
- Support multi-national customers in a consistent manner worldwide
Achievements
- Ability to capture and share information with employees, customers and partners anywhere in the world
- Highly efficient call center, email and web communications across offices on four continents
- Improved staff training times
- Decreased resolution times due to deployment of a common phone and email management system
When Ron Norton first evaluated RightNow, he didn't realize he was on his way to building a global support system that would yield significant competitive advantages for his company. He was just looking for a way to improve the efficiency of his technical support operations.
But, over time, his investment in RightNow's CRM technology blossomed into a powerful, consistent support system with impact well beyond customer service.
"RightNow enables us to capture information anywhere in our organization and make it readily available to anyone who needs it," declares Norton, director of global support services at international supply-chain solutions provider Intermec. "That is a valuable capability for a company in the technology sector, where the amount of information people need to do their jobs is enormous and the pace at which that information changes is relentless."
Norton came to RightNow as so many other companies do, recognizing that an online knowledge base would enable customers to quickly and easily find answers themselves on the Intermec website. This would be a useful service for them and would help reduce Intermec's phone and email support volume. Norton also recognized the value of RightNow's email response management capabilities and looked forward to the control and accountability they would provide for the company's growing email communication workload.
However, once Intermec's implementation was underway and its initial benefits realized, Norton began to expand his vision of what RightNow could do. For one thing, he realized there was no reason to maintain separate tracking systems for email and phone. So he transitioned his call center staff from their existing application to RightNow. "There are a lot of advantages to using a common tracking system across your communication channels," Norton observes. "First, you realize savings any time you reduce the number of technologies you're using. Second, you gain a common view of all your interactions with the customer—which allows you to resolve problems faster and more efficiently."
Norton also saw that RightNow's online knowledge base technology could be as useful inside his organization as it was outside. His first internal implementation was naturally in the technical support call center, where at-their-fingertips access to the growing knowledge base soon enabled support techs to resolve customers' issues faster than ever. "Having a good knowledge base available inside the call center also allows new hires to become much more productive, much more quickly," he adds.
Because Intermec is a global organization with offices on four continents, the ability to make a comprehensive, easy-to-use knowledge base available to tech support staff everywhere—as well as a common worldwide case management system—is of tremendous value. "Multinational clients want to know you deliver consistent quality-of-service across all of their locations," explains Norton. "With RightNow, we clearly prove our employees around the world have access to the same information and case management tools."
RightNow ensures any open incidents created within RightNow - anywhere in the world - are quickly and accurately routed to the appropriate support contact, based on both the location of the customer and the product or topic involved.
Intermec's global implementation (including a Spanish-language version of the system for the company's office in Mexico) also contributes to the knowledge base's exceptional scope and accuracy. "We can capture knowledge about anything anywhere at any time," boasts Norton. "So our knowledge base is always growing and being refined to the benefit of the company and our customers."
RightNow's hosted delivery model eliminates the technical provisioning challenges that would otherwise have hampered the global rollout of the Intermec customer care management system. "Because RightNow is built on a fully web-based architecture, the only thing our offices need is a decent internet connection," he says. "Plus, I don't have to worry about coordinating the work of several essentially independent IT staffs."
Soon after the re-engineering of Intermec's global customer service operations was underway, Norton began exploring the possibility of applying RightNow's CRM technology to other areas of the company. For example, Intermec's equipment repair department also manages and utilizes a tremendous volume of ever-changing technical information. So RightNow was brought in to alleviate the problem. Other areas of the company, such as field service and pre-sales systems consultants soon followed suit.
Norton collectively branded Intermec's growing RightNow deployment as "Knowledge Central." That branding helped further promote the use of RightNow to address additional business challenges across the company. "It's gotten to the point where, when a couple of managers are discussing a problem or situation, one of them will ask 'Do you think Knowledge Central can help us with this?'" Norton relates. "That really shows you how universal a tool RightNow is."
RightNow also makes it easier for Intermec to keep extending the breadth of its products and services. "Technical competency is one of the primary hindering factors in broadening your technology portfolio," says Norton. "RightNow allows us to achieve and maintain greater competency for a wider range of products."
That's quite an outcome for a purchase originally made to simply improve a company website. RightNow has now enabled Intermec to substantially improve the quality of its customer care across all channels around the world. Every answer in every country across every channel is now consistent and accurate. And Intermec employees everywhere can get a complete "snapshot" of every customer's support history—ensuring their ability to deliver highly effective, highly personalized service.
"What we've done with RightNow is really beyond anything I would have ever imagined when I first looked at it," admits Norton. "The impact of this technology on Intermec is so pervasive that it transcends any ROI calculation we would try to make which would certainly be many, many times what we paid for it. RightNow is a strategic platform for supporting our world-class brand with world-class customer care."
Intermec Technologies Support Site | Intermec Technologies Homepage
About Intermec Technologies Corp.
Intermec develops, manufactures and integrates wired and wireless automated data collection, radio frequency identification (RFId) and mobile computing systems for companies worldwide. Intermec, together with its network of leading technology partners, provides complete solutions to meet its customers’ supply-chain information requirements from concept to completion. Intermec serves thousands of companies worldwide, including 75 percent of the Fortune 500.
Greg Gianforte