RightNow® Technologies (Company
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Studies)(Nasdaq: RNOW), the leading on demand CRM company focused on customer service, today announced ACCO Brands’ Kensington Technology Group has implemented RightNow Service™, as its contact center platform, and RightNow Professional Services has integrated RightNow Service with Kensington’s mainframe order system. This integration enables Kensington’s customer service agents to quickly order replacement parts, eliminating the multiple steps previously required to do so.
RightNow Service provides Kensington with a complete, multi-channel contact center solution that ensures its ability to provide fast, accurate and consistent answers to customers’ questions via phone, email or web self-service. As a web-based on demand solution, the RightNow system can be easily shared by users at Kensington’s own offices and by agents at its outsourced customer service contractor in Hyderabad, India. RightNow’s self-service knowledge base technology enables the majority of Kensington’s customers to find answers to their questions without assistance on the company’s web site. This knowledge base is also used as a reference by contact center agents, resulting in a reduction of average talk-times from twenty minutes to just three.
The integration of RightNow with Kensington’s mainframe order entry system was particularly critical because part replacement is often the most cost-effective and convenient solution for the customer. Before implementing RightNow, the process by which an agent ordered a replacement part was a manual one, and it involved five different people. As a result of the integration, which allows agents to place the order directly through the RightNow application, only two people are involved in the process: the agent who places the order and the person who ships it. This reduces the cost of processing the approximately 2,000 such orders every month by about 60 percent. It also gets the part to the customer more quickly.
The integration was performed by RightNow’s Professional Services Group, which created an XML-to-EDI interface to capture order information from the web-based contact center platform and deliver it to Kensington’s mainframe system.
“RightNow’s Professional Services Group demonstrated both a clear understanding of our business challenge and the technical expertise necessary to deliver an effective solution,” Jeff Nagy, web project manager at Kensington, said. “The combination of RightNow’s core on demand platform and the value-added customization have resulted in substantial improvements to both the quality and cost-efficiency of our service and support operations.”
RightNow’s Professional Services Group has performed a wide range of integrations between RightNow Service and other applications—including commercial enterprise software, custom-developed applications and other hosted/on demand services.
“RightNow has consistently demonstrated that its on demand solutions can be integrated with other enterprise systems to the same degree and effect as internally deployed software,” Sean Forbes, vice president of marketing and business development at RightNow, said. “Kensington’s experience is just another example of how our customers can reap all the benefits of the on demand model—including reduced technology ownership costs, accelerated time-to-benefit and great system reliability—while at the same time implementing fully customized integrations that effectively address highly customer- or industry-specific IT issues.”
About Kensington®
Kensington Technology Group, a division of ACCO Brands, Inc., based in San Mateo, CA, manufactures computer accessories such as wireless mice & keyboards, laptop accessories and security cables for laptops. Within Kensington, ACCO has created the Web Center of Excellence, handling all web development for ACCO, including Swingline, Wilson Jones and Apollo/Boone.
About RightNow Technologies
RightNow Technologies is a leading provider of on-demand software solutions designed to optimize customer service operations for businesses of all sizes. RightNow’s comprehensive customer service solution features a self-learning knowledgebase that is designed to seamlessly support multiple communications channels including web, interactive voice, email, chat, telephone and proactive outbound email communications. RightNow offers its solutions through a multi-tenant, hosted on-demand model to reduce the cost and risk associated with deploying traditional enterprise customer relationship management, or CRM, software. RightNow also provides business process optimization and product tune-ups throughout the lifecycle of its client relationships. Founded in 1997, RightNow is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, with offices in Europe and Asia. For further information visit www.rightnow.com.
RightNow is a registered trademark of RightNow Technologies, Inc. NASDAQ is a registered trademark of the NASDAQ Stock Market.
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