RightNow Helps OpenTable Achieve Profitable Growth And Market Dominance
Goals
- Build diner loyalty by providing a superb online experience
- Minimize service-and-support costs
- Pinpoint and resolve emerging issues
Achievements
- More than 95 percent of diners’ issues handled via web self-service and email
- Email response headcount flat despite 82 percent growth in annual bookings
- Able to handle peak periods without adding staff or compromising service
OpenTable’s business model is a compelling one. The company provides a hardware and software system that replaces pen-and-paper at a restaurant’s host stand. This automates the process of taking reservations and managing tables, while allowing restaurant owners to build robust databases that they can use to create effective guest recognition programs and targeted email marketing campaigns.
Once a restaurant has the OpenTable system in place, it can also tap into the company’s online reservation site. In fact, more than 1.8 million people every month now dine out with reservations booked online at more than 6,500 restaurants worldwide through www.opentable.com. The free online service provides diners, concierges, and administrative professionals with a fast, efficient way to find available tables that meet specified criteria for cuisine, price, location, and time. Search results reflect real-time table availability, and reservations are immediately recorded in the same electronic reservation book used by the restaurant’s maitre’d.
For this business model to work, diners have to be very comfortable using OpenTable’s online service. At the same time, OpenTable has to minimize its diner support costs while keeping a close eye on any emerging issues with the site or with specific restaurants, so that diners keep coming back to the site.
RightNow has helped OpenTable fulfill all three of these critical objectives. With RightNow's CRM product, diners can quickly find online answers to their questions about the service. OpenTable can also respond quickly to their email inquiries. And with RightNow’s sophisticated reporting capabilities, OpenTable can quickly determine if a particular issue is generating an inordinate number of diner inquiries—so it can nip the problem in the bud.
“RightNow intelligently automates and monitors OpenTable’s ongoing conversation with the dining public, which allows us to both achieve a high level of satisfaction and control costs,” says OpenTable customer support director Dale Bagwell. “It’s an invaluable technology that’s helping us achieve profitable growth and customer service excellence.”
Providing Restaurant Patrons With A Great Online Experience
In its first few months using RightNow's CRM product, OpenTable built a knowledge foundation of about 100 separate items. Site visitors can search online by category, keyword, or natural language query to get immediate answers to their questions any time of the day or night. Between the completeness of the knowledge foundation and the effectiveness of RightNow’s search functions, about 90 percent of those who use the site’s self-service area find the answer they’re looking for.
Because some site visitors will immediately submit their question using the site’s web form without even trying to use the self-service area, OpenTable implemented RightNow’s SmartAssistant™ feature. This feature “scans” the text of customers’ queries and automatically suggests relevant content from the knowledge foundation. According to Bagwell, SmartAssistant is helping deflect incoming questions—further reducing the company’s contact center workload, while also providing customers with immediate answers to their questions 24 hours a day.
OpenTable is able to handle the remaining email traffic very efficiently. RightNow uses inherent “rules” functionality to route emails to the appropriate person based on topic. It also makes it easy for OpenTable staff to insert standardized text into their replies. As a result, the company is able to turn around most of its replies in 12 hours or less. Just as important, the company hasn’t had to hire more staff to handle email—even though its business has grown by about 82 percent annually.
Web self-service and streamlined email response management are particularly important to OpenTable during holidays, when demand is high and restaurants may change their hours or book their entire facility for a special party. With RightNow's CRM product, the company can handle these peak periods without adding more staff or compromising service.
RightNow is also a powerful diagnostic tool for OpenTable as it seeks to deliver a near-flawless total customer experience. By closely monitoring a variety of reports on service incident trends, the company’s managers can quickly zero in on potential problems. For example, it can see if reservations at a particular restaurant are generating an inordinate number of questions. If that’s the case, it may be that the restaurant’s staff simply needs a little bit of additional training on the company’s software.
“RightNow gives us tremendous visibility into what’s going on with our customers, our site, and our restaurants,” says Bagwell. “So we can be extremely pro-active about optimizing the quality and reliability of our service, even as we automate to reduce contact center workloads.”
RightNow: Effective Technology From A Responsive Partner
Bagwell is a big proponent of RightNow’s software-as-a-service delivery model. This model has enabled OpenTable to implement a sophisticated system for managing its knowledge foundation, providing web self-service, efficiently handling email, and generating a full range of reports without having to bear the ownership costs associated with conventional business applications. The software-as-a-service model also enables the company to readily scale capacity up or down as required to support seasonal demands.
Bagwell also praises RightNow for its own customer experience. “RightNow’s customer service and support is very responsive,” he says. “Whether we’re checking their own online self-service resources, asking a question by email, or talking to them on the phone, they’re always able to quickly give us the information we need.”
He adds that RightNow has demonstrated a real commitment to OpenTable whenever particularly difficult business challenges have arisen. When the company was rolling its core “system of record” application in Japan, for example, it needed to use a double-byte version of RightNow temporarily in order to capture and store CRM data in Japanese. Delays in the application roll out forced OpenTable to extend this temporary deployment several months longer than originally scheduled. RightNow accommodated OpenTable with a licensing agreement that kept the project from going over budget.
“We were in a difficult situation, and RightNow came through for us,” says Bagwell. “That showed us that they’re a real business partner we can trust to help us achieve our long-term goals.”
OpenTable Support Site | OpenTable Homepage
About OpenTable
OpenTable is a leading supplier of reservation and table management software for restaurants, with more than 7,000 customers throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, and Mexico. The company also operates www.opentable.com, the world’s most popular site for making restaurant reservations online. Each month, more than 1.8 million people dine out with reservations booked through www.opentable.com. This represents an estimated $1.2 billion in annual restaurant revenue.
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