Case Study: Nikon - RightNow Helps Deliver a Satisfying Service Experience

Nikon uses RightNow  to improve service experience across all communication channels—including 50% reduction in call response times and 70% reduction in email response times

Goals

	Scale customer experience management capabilities to keep pace with rapidly growing customer base
	Support premium brand with premium customer experience
	Keep costs under control

Achievements

	Superb service experience across all communication channels—including 50% reduction in call response times and 70% reduction in email response times
	Departmental headcount reduced despite tripling of unit sales
	Customer satisfaction scores consistently more than 95%
	Improved visibility into customer concerns enhances marketing and product development

David Dentry was given a mission. As the newly promoted general manager of Nikon Inc.’s Technical Office (TO) for the popular Nikon digital camera products, he had to make sure that Nikon Inc. could deliver a high-quality support experience that would satisfy customers of the premier photography brand—even as growing sales were taxing existing resources. And increasing those resources was not an option.

Dentry clearly succeeded. He and his TO team have improved Nikon’s responsiveness to customers, even as the company’s unit sales volume has increased substantially. To make this achievement more remarkable, department headcount remained flat for two years—and they recently experienced a substantial reduction in headcount.

Dentry started by creating a document that described an ideal customer service system. The document outlined how Nikon’s contact-center staff should be provided with the incident management tools and web-based knowledge resources they would need to respond quickly and precisely to customers’ needs across all channels. It also described a system whereby a subset of the internal technical knowledge base would be exposed on a public web site to enable online self-service.

One of Dentry’s staff read the document and suggested he take a look at RightNow. “It was amazing,” recalls Dentry. “Once I saw RightNow in action, it was almost as if they had used what I’d written as their development blueprint.”

Optimizing the customer experience step-by-step

Dentry and his team implemented RightNow in phases. They focused first on the web and then replaced their then current email system with RightNow to ensure a seamless customer experience across both communication channels. Based on those successes, they then replaced Nikon’s homegrown call tracking system with RightNow. To ensure a smooth transition, RightNow’s Professional Services organization helped them import two years of existing SQL data into the new system.

RightNow now provides Nikon with a powerful system for optimizing phone, email and web communication with customers. The system enables Nikon contact center staff to view customers’ complete service histories across all contact points—including telephone, web site, email and fax—so they can provide effective, personalized support. It allows incidents to be quickly routed and/or escalated to the right staff member across the department’s various locations and tiers. And it provides a powerful knowledge base that ensures both Nikon staff and its customers can find approved, up-to-date, and relevant answers to common questions with just a few keystrokes.

Dentry is emphatic about the benefits of using a common system across all communication channels. “It really helps our people when they can see everything the customer has done in the past,” he explains. “With RightNow, you can immediately get a sense of whether you’re talking to a novice or an expert. You can also avoid going over information that they’ve already been given.”

Because RightNow’s reporting and analytical functions also encompass all channels, Nikon has gained unprecedented visibility into its customers’ issues and concerns. This visibility further enables the company to deliver a great customer experience. Plus, it provides extremely valuable information to the company’s designers and marketers, allowing them to more quickly respond to the ever-changing needs of the buying public. That’s an important competitive advantage for Nikon. It’s also a big win for Nikon’s customers, since it helps put them at the center of everything Nikon does.

RightNow has been such an effective platform for Nikon Inc. that it has now been embraced on a global basis. Nikon Europe has completed an implementation covering the entire continent and twelve languages. The company’s office in Japan has deployed RightNow to support its market in that country, and a rollout is underway to use RightNow across the rest of its Asian operations.

Measurable impact on the business

One of the biggest gains for the phone channel has been the speed with which Nikon staff can actually start working on customers’ issues. Before implementing RightNow, it took about a minute to get the information necessary to initiate resolution. Now, it takes about half a minute. Multiply that 30-second savings by tens of thousands of calls per month, and the productivity gains are obviously substantial.

On the email side, the gains have been similarly impressive. Whereas once it might take Nikon 40 hours to respond to a customer question, it now takes just 12 to 18. “That improved responsiveness is something customers really appreciate,” says Dentry. “It also helps reduce your call volume, since most customers will pick up the phone if they don’t hear back from you within 24 hours.”

In addition to being bullish on RightNow’s technology, Dentry is extremely pleased with RightNow’s support performance. He has taken advantage of RightNow’s free Tune-Up services to get expert advice about everything from knowledge base content to incident workflow rules, and he has been consistently impressed by the speed with which RightNow responds to Nikon’s questions and issues. “RightNow delivers the level of customer service to which we aspire,” he says. “This is definitely a company that practices what it preaches.”

Dentry adds that RightNow has paid for itself many times over. “The fact that we are supporting so many more units in the field without increasing our department’s headcount is evidence that RightNow has boosted our productivity,” he declares.

More importantly, however, is what RightNow has done for Nikon’s brand and customer loyalty. The company continually scores over 95 percent in its customer satisfaction surveys, and that satisfaction translates into more sales opportunities for Nikon. “When you deliver a great customer experience, they come back and buy from you again,” says Dentry. “They also say great things about you to their friends, and that’s the best advertising there is.”