RightNow® Technologies (NASDAQ: RNOW) (Company
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Studies), a leading provider of on demand CRM software solutions, today announced that North Carolina State University’s Virtual Advising Center has achieved a 7500:1 ratio of students to advisers as a result of implementing RightNow Service™. The effective use of RightNow Service has enhanced the quality of service that students receive by freeing advisors from answering the high volume of simple, redundant questions—ultimately allowing advisors to devote more time to providing personal counseling to students who really need it. This extraordinary efficiency has enabled the Center to fulfill its mission despite significant budget constraints.
RightNow was chosen over other competing products, including Remedy—which, under the University’s site license, would have been available to the Center at no cost. The Center selected RightNow because of its robust knowledge base management capabilities, user-friendly online search functions, integrated email, excellent reporting and assessment tools, and backend privacy and security among multiple user groups.
The Virtual Advising Center was created in 1999 to provide a single, common information resource for students to get answers to their questions about all of the University’s programs. This is a particularly important mission at North Carolina State, because the undergraduate student population is divided at the outset by their areas of interest. The fact that there is no general college at NC State presents difficulties to students who are undecided or who want to change majors—since, for example, the Agriculture Department adviser to whom a student is assigned isn’t likely to be able to answer questions about the University’s Business Management program.
Using RightNow, the Center has posted more than 330 online “Answers” that address about 87 percent of all queries without staff intervention. The Center’s online Answers are viewed more than 1,500 times per month. RightNow also provides the email management necessary to ensure students receive prompt, accurate responses from appropriate subject matter experts to the questions they submit via the Internet.
“By empowering us to leverage both the expertise of our advisors and the popularity of the web, RightNow has enabled us to bring tremendous efficiency to our communication with students,” Andrea Irby, the Center’s director, said. “RightNow has also been extremely responsive to our needs—whether we’ve had a simple technical question or were trying to determine how to optimize a business process.”
North Carolina State University joins a list of more than 70 leading higher education institutions that have implemented RightNow to improve student services and reduce operational costs. Other RightNow customers in the higher education market include University of Michigan, University of Oklahoma, Washington State University and Australia’s University of Southern Queensland.
“Universities and other educational institutions around the world continue to discover new ways to use the web to serve tech-savvy student customers more effectively and cost-efficiently,” Sean Forbes, vice president of Marketing and Business Development at RightNow, said. “RightNow fits this strategy perfectly by enabling institutions to gather knowledge from across their diverse functional departments and make it available in a single centralized, easy-to-use service portal.”
The Virtual Advising Center’s RightNow-based system can be viewed at http://ncstateadvisingcentral.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ncstateadvisingcentral.cfg/php/enduser/home.php.
About North Carolina State University
Located on 2,110 acres in Raleigh, the state’s capital, North Carolina State University serves just over 30,000 students with outstanding degree programs in the humanities and social sciences, design, education, natural resources, physical and life sciences, agriculture, business, engineering, textiles and veterinary medicine. The university has an annual budget of approximately $820 million and an endowment valued at more than $312 million. It is ranked eighth among national research universities in non-federal funded research, 13th among national research universities in industry-funded research, and 31st nationally in total expenditures for research and development.
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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