Putting a lid on CRM costs with self-service

ANALYSIS The $400 million Remington Arms Company wanted to find a way to improve customer service and contain costs while handling the more than 1,000 e-mail inquires and 6,000 telephone calls it received weekly during its peak season. "With 35,000 to 45,000 individual visits to our Web site daily, it became obvious that our consumers were active Internet users and ready for online self-service," says Ned Moore, Remington's e-business development manager. He was right. Within months of implementing RightNow eService Center from RightNow Technologies, the company had reduced e-mail volume by almost 90 percent and telephone calls by 10 percent, according to Moore. Another enterprise ripe for self-service customer relationship management (CRM) was Andale, an online provider of commerce management tools and services for automating and integrating all aspects of multichannel retailing. With more than 1 million users of its products and services, Andale needed to provide customer service despite its modest staff of 30-plus employees. "We got to a point with customer service [where] we were operating in firefighting mode, and it had to stop," says Dan Russo, vice president of marketing at the Mountain View, California, company. Using technology from eGain Communications--specifically, eGain Mail to manage thousands of inbound e-mails per week and eGain Inform, a dynamic FAQ generator--the company has seen a 70 percent reduction in the number of incoming e-mails and has been able to cut its customer service team from 20 reps to 10. (Through attrition, it's now down to five.) Wait times and the number of abandoned calls have also dropped. Self-service CRM lets customers find immediate answers to many of their questions through FAQs and search-and-browse tools. (For Remington customers, that means finding answers to questions regarding 200 years' worth of firearms products.) Successful self-service implementations are measured by a reduction in call volumes and cost per interaction plus perceived quality of service. According to Forrester Research, the number of buyers requesting self-service while shopping online is on the rise--30 percent in 2001 vs. only 12 percent in 1999. Other vendors offering self-service CRM applications include Banter, iPhrase, Kana, and Siebel. Companies can opt for point solutions or suites; many are also offered on an outsourced basis.