RightNow Helps Polaroid Reduce Its Call Center Workload Even As Its Customer Base Multiplies (email this article)

RightNow Technologies (Company Profile, Past Stories, Case Studies), the world’s leading provider of hosted customer service and support solutions, today announced Polaroid Corporation’s implementation of RightNow eService Center has significantly improved the efficiency of its customer service operations.  This has resulted in reduced call center volume and significantly diminished email volume, even as the number of Polaroid digital cameras in the field has grown exponentially.  

Polaroid has seen a self-service rate of approximately 98%, with more than 1.5 million Web visitors in the past year.  By enabling Polaroid to keep customer service costs steady, while sales revenues increased, RightNow has boosted the business unit’s bottom-line performance.  Polaroid has been a RightNow customer since the fall of 1999.  Polaroid selected RightNow after an extensive review of available customer service solutions.  RightNow was chosen because of its cross-channel integration, its ease of use, and its availability as a hosted service.

“RightNow has made a major contribution to our cost-control efforts by making us more efficient across our Web, email, and call center channels,” Yale Cohen, Polaroid’s manager of service communications, said.  “RightNow’s comprehensive reporting capabilities have also allowed us to document our efficiency gains, so we can clearly quantify the positive impact of the technology on our business.”

The ROI that Polaroid experienced with RightNow arises from its full range of customer service-and-support capabilities, including:
•Simplified creation, management, and navigation of a Web site knowledge base that, in Polaroid’s case, answers 98 percent of customers’ questions;
•Email management that ensures response-time targets can be consistently met and that allows the same knowledge base to be used to quickly provide customers with answers to their inquiries, and;
•Knowledge base access for Polaroid’s call center operators, empowering even new employees to answer customers’ questions quickly and accurately.

RightNow knowledge bases are uniquely effective because their content is driven by the actual questions that customers ask.  RightNow-powered Web sites therefore directly address the issues that most concern customers—and continue to do so even as those issues change over time.  RightNow also makes even the largest online knowledge bases easy to navigate with keyword and natural language search capabilities, as well as automatically generated “top ten” question lists.

Through the use of hyperlinks, RightNow also re-directs Polaroid’s customers to relevant third-party Web content.  This is essential for Polaroid's current business strategy, under which companies licensing Polaroid's brand for new digital cameras also have responsibility for customer support for those products.

Polaroid has also used RightNow to assist in third-party RFP requests. Instead of having to answer many of the same repetitive questions through the call center, Polaroid is using RightNow to reduce the number of phone calls through online self-service.

“Companies like Polaroid clearly value the ability to keep customer service costs down even as their businesses grow, and still provide customers with the highest levels of service,” Sean Forbes, vice president of marketing and business development at RightNow, said.  “They also appreciate the fact that, under our hosted delivery model, they can continue scaling their customer service capabilities to accommodate that growth without having to spend money and resources on additional IT infrastructure.”

Polaroid’s RightNow-powered online customer service site can be seen at http://polaroid.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/polaroid.cfg/php/enduser/home.php.

About Polaroid Corporation
Polaroid Corporation is the worldwide leader in instant photography. The company supplies instant photographic cameras and films; digital imaging hardware, software and media; secure identification systems; and sunglasses to markets worldwide. Visit the Polaroid Web site at www.polaroid.com.

About RightNow Technologies
RightNow Technologies is the leading customer service and support solutions company that radically and rapidly improves the effectiveness of service and support operations with easy-to-implement/easy-to-use technology, replicable best practices drawn from the industry's broadest base of successful implementations, and engagement terms that create accountability for delivering quantifiable results.

RightNow has delivered these benefits to more than 1,000 customers worldwide such as: Air New Zealand, Ben & Jerry's, Briggs and Stratton, British Airways, Cisco, Dolby Laboratories, Inc., Electronic Arts, Pioneer, Raymarine, Remington, Sanyo, Specialized Bicycles, and more than 100 public sector clients including the Social Security Administration and the State of Florida.

Founded in 1997, RightNow has offices in Bozeman, Dallas, San Mateo, London, and Sydney, with an associated office in Tokyo.  RightNow's products are available in 17 languages worldwide.  For further information visit http://www.rightnow.com/.