RightNow – On Demand CRM Software

Kodak Easyshare Gallery Uses Rightnow To Control Costs, Manage Demand Spikes, And Optimize The Customer Experience

Goals

• Control contact center costs as volume continues to rise
• Better handle peak seasonal demand
• Ensure that customers get consistent, accurate answers
• Expand service coverage to 24/7

Achievements

• Voice self-service significantly reduces staff workloads
• Transparent routing of calls to outsourcing partner eliminates need to hire and train temporary workers
• Common voice and web knowledge base ensures consistency of answers and lowers administrative complexity
• Automated systems provides service 24 hours a day, delivering an enhanced customer experience

Kodak is one of the world’s great brands, with an unmatched reputation for reliability and customer satisfaction. Kodak is also committed to leadership in the digital photography market. That’s why it’s very important for the company to optimize the customer’s quality-of-experience with Kodak EasyShare Gallery, an online service for managing, protecting and sharing digital pictures—as well as ordering prints and specialty photo products.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. As digital cameras became increasingly popular and more customers visited the site, Kodak became less able to respond to customer calls with its customary speed and accuracy. The problem became especially pronounced during spikes in call volume, especially those that occurred during the holiday season. And those spikes were driving up costs. So Kodak had to take steps to improve the scalability and efficiency of its contact center.

Those steps included implementing RightNow—along with the deployment of on demand routing and call center technology from Echopass and engagement with a domestic outsourced call center—which gave Kodak the ability to automatically answer a wide range of customer calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This automation quickly reduced contact center workloads, saving the company money and ensuring its ability to deliver a superior customer experience any time of the day or night. As a result, Kodak can continue profitably growing its online business while protecting its worldwide brand.

“RightNow has become an indispensable component of our total contact center environment,” says John Allum-Poon, director of customer support for Kodak EasyShare Gallery. “We have significantly reduced the number of customer calls our outsourcer’s agents have to handle, and can answer many types of questions around the clock without adding a third shift.”

Comprehensive Automated Voice Capabilities Drive Savings And Improve Service

RightNow supports Kodak’s customer service objectives with a variety of useful capabilities. All customer service calls first come into RightNow, and are then passed on either to the appropriate voice self-service applications or to the Echopass call routing system.

The voice-enabled self-service knowledge base, for example, lets customers find answers to their most common questions by speaking their answers to a series of automated questions and/or using their phone’s touch-tone keypad. This allows Kodak to provide prompt service any time of the day or night with no labor cost.

RightNow also integrates with a Sybase database to provide customers with answers about their own individual accounts. Because roughly 35 percent of the company’s overall call volume comes from customers checking on the status of an order, RightNow provides a quick and easy means for customers to access this information. Customers simply speak or punch in appropriate numbers or answers as prompted, and are able to determine their order status, again avoiding more costly support channels.

At the same time, RightNow provides Kodak with the reporting it needs to better understand the needs and behaviors of its customers. For example, if the system indicates that customers are asking repetitive questions about ordering products online, Allum-Poon and his staff can re-evaluate the design of the corresponding web pages and make any necessary changes.

Within a few months of deployment, this fully automated customer service system was handling 21,000 calls per month for Kodak—significantly reducing its call center workload.

Just as important, RightNow provides all these capabilities as an on demand application, which means that Kodak does not have to allocate capital or IT staff to ownership of the software and additional supporting IT infrastructure.

“RightNow is very easy for customers to use and integrates very well with our other business systems,” says Allum-Poon. “And it keeps answering more and more calls for us as we refine and expand our implementation.”

Supporting A Holistic Contact Center Optimization Strategy

Kodak made two other significant moves in conjunction with its implementation of RightNow. One was the deployment of an on demand call routing solution from Echopass. As with RightNow, Echopass enables Kodak to reap the business benefits of deploying technology without taking on any of the associated ownership burdens.

Echopass hosts and manages the switching environment for Kodak, which simply has to provide instructions about its business rules for call routing. Callers can be transparently routed either to Kodak or to Kodak’s outsourcing partner, depending on their needs. Kodak doesn’t have to babysit hardware, administer software patches, or perform any other maintenance on the system.

“Echopass gives us the benefit of an advanced call center infrastructure solution without any of the hassles,” explains Allum-Poon. “Plus, because they already had a close working relationship with RightNow, we didn’t have to worry about any snags in the implementation.”

In fact, it took RightNow and Echopass just two months to get Kodak’s system up and running. This was, in part, because RightNow has a close working relationship with Echopass and is a pre-integrated partner in the Echopass EchoSystemTM. “The whole project went as planned, despite the fact that there were many milestones along the way that could have delayed us had they not been completed on time,” recalls Allum-Poon.

The other key decision Kodak made was to outsource its front-line contact center staff to a U.S. partner. This eliminated the problems Kodak had historically faced in hiring temporary workers to handle periods of peak volume. Allum-Poon found that these temporary hires did not fully absorb all the information presented to them in training, and that—since they were not actually Kodak employees—they didn’t always perform at the level required to support the Kodak brand.

Kodak’s outsourcing partner, on the other hand, manages contact center staff as its core business. It also has a strong financial incentive to fulfill Kodak’s needs and keep its business.

“Equipping and motivating contact center agents to handle temporary assignments is a specialized skill we don’t have to develop, since there are plenty of companies that can provide it as a turnkey service,” observes Allum-Poon. “Plus, we now have much more flexibility to dynamically add or reduce capacity as dictated by the needs of the business.”

A Strong Foundation For Profitable Growth

Allum-Poon emphasizes the importance of developing knowledge base content that’s closely aligned with customers’ needs. “The most sophisticated contact center technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the answers to your customers’ most common questions,” he notes. “So you have to be very smart about getting the right information from subject-matter experts across your company and feeding it into your self-service systems.”

Kodak also benefits from the fact that it uses RightNow’s customer service solutions to handle its email and web self-service channels. This ensures consistency of information across all channels and enables Kodak to manage all of its knowledge in just one place.

In addition to meeting its immediate needs, the combination of RightNow, Echopass, and outsourcing has positioned Kodak EasyShare Gallery well for continued profitable growth. The company will be able to handle more customers without increased spending on call center staff—and will be able to scale its call capacity without having to worry about server hardware and network bandwidth.

“When you engage with on demand technology providers, you really relieve yourself of a lot of management burdens,” says Allum-Poon. “RightNow and Echopass are doing a great job of managing our contact center infrastructure, so we can concentrate on our core business—which is delivering superlative photography-related goods and services to a buying public that has trusted the Kodak name for generations.”

Kodak Imaging Network, Inc. Homepage

About Kodak Imaging Network, Inc.

Kodak is the leader in helping people take, share, print, and view images – for memories, for information, for business, and for entertainment. With sales of $13.5 billion in 2004, the company is committed to a digitally oriented growth strategy focused on four businesses: Digital & Film Imaging Systems, Health, Graphic Communications, and Display & Components. More information about Kodak (NYSE: EK) is available at http://www.kodak.com/.