RightNow Technologies (Company
Profile, Past
Stories, Case
Studies), the world’s leading provider of hosted customer service and support solutions, today announced the adoption of its industry-leading customer
service solution by Softbank BB, the provider of the largest broadband service in Japan called Yahoo!BB. By deploying RightNow, the company is significantly
improving the efficiency of its call center, ensuring both the competitive superiority of its customer service and its ability to cost-effectively support its growing subscriber
base, which had exceeded 2,961,000 users as of July 2003. RightNow is distributed exclusively in Japan by Mitsui & Co. Ltd.
The Softbank BB is currently deploying RightNow as an internal information resource for its call center operators, enabling operators to quickly pinpoint answers to
customers’ questions. This allows them to answer questions quickly and consistently, regardless of their personal experience or expertise.
As a result of the implementation, call center response times have been significantly reduced, as have the duration of the calls. The number of incidents that have to
be escalated to technical specialists has also been reduced—further increasing efficiency and boosting the partnership’s return on its investment.
“RightNow provides us with a powerful, strategic platform for providing our customers with superior support, while ensuring that our per-incident costs are as low as possible,”
Takenobu Miki, the General Manager of Service Process Management at Softbank BB, said. “Its intelligent knowledge management features and Web-based
architecture have enabled the partnership to reap business benefits without placing excessive burdens on our corporate IT resources.”
RightNow’s patented technology enables companies to build and refine their customer service knowledge bases over time. This ensures content authoring does not
create major additional workloads for technical experts, and knowledge base content directly reflects the actual questions and issues of foremost concern to customers.
This optimizes the effectiveness of the knowledge base and the ROI delivered by the solution, which also provides a full range of advanced incident-handling and
reporting functions.
Because RightNow is fully Web-based, it could be deployed across all of the partnership’s call center locations without the costs and delays associated with conventional
enterprise software implementations. The knowledge base can also be easily and securely accessed by the company’s various distribution partners and agents.
“Scalable, cost-efficient customer service is a primary requirement for profitable growth,” Sean Forbes, vice president of marketing and business development at RightNow,
said. “We are honored to have been selected to help Softbank BB fulfill this critical business requirement.”
About Softbank BB
Softbank BB is committed to enriching people and society by providing a wide range of communications tools, including Yahoo! BB and other broadband infrastructure,
services and products.
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 delivers 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 14 languages worldwide. For further information visit http://www.rightnow.com/.
-30-
email this article