Case Study: Activision

Activevision's RightNow-based service environment allows the company to deliver an enhanced customer experience.

Goals

	Deliver a premium customer experience across all channels to support the company’s brand and strengthen customer loyalty
	Effectively manage customer support costs
	Integrate off-site support contractors and in-house agents into a single, seamless service environment
	Use customer feedback to drive product improvements

Achievements

	Fast, accurate and consistent support response via phone, email and web
	Off-site and in-house staff use common system—with no incremental IT costs
	System provides market insight to product managers and executives

Great technical support is a must in the highly competitive electronic gaming market. If you can’t deliver a satisfying customer experience, you’re going to lose business to a competitor that can.

That’s why Activision is committed to delivering superior service. It knows customer satisfaction and loyalty are key factors in its success. RightNow has allowed the company to deliver a great customer experience cost-efficiently.

With RightNow, Activision is also leveraging its support interactions to gain deep insight into its customers’ issues and needs—so it can continue to improve their total gaming experience.

“RightNow is a powerful platform for effectively serving and understanding your customers,” declares Activision’s customer service manager, Mike Hill. “It has also delivered tremendous ROI by helping us to more efficiently manage customer support costs.”

From disparate tools to a unified, multi-channel service environment

Before implementing RightNow, Activision had the same fragmented service environment as many other companies. It used one application to manage its call center, another to manage email, and yet another to maintain FAQs on its website.

This fragmented environment was inefficient and ineffective. It was a time-consuming job to turn new support issues discovered on the phone into content for the company’s website. If a customer followed up an email exchange with a phone call, the Activision support staffer would often waste time going over information that had already been covered. It was also difficult to create reports that spanned interactions across the company’s phone, email and web channels.

“Our contact center operation was not integrated which created a lot of extra work and made it very difficult to track our overall performance,” recalls Hill.

Activision searched for a solution that would integrate and improve service across all channels. A variety of solutions were carefully evaluated based on three primary criteria: features, value and integration of communication channels.

RightNow quickly emerged as the best choice for Activision’s needs. It delivered an integrated environment for managing and automating support workflows across all channels. It leveraged a common, highly sophisticated knowledge base management system across those channels, and provided the flexible reporting Activision needed to maximize visibility into what customers were saying.

“With RightNow, we could focus our energies on making our customers happy, rather than wrestling with the mechanics of communications,” Hill explains.

Actionable insight drives decisions that optimize customer satisfaction

RightNow has also been an invaluable source of market insight for Activision. By capturing data about support incidents across all channels, RightNow provides the company’s managers and executives with a rich source of actionable information.

For example, RightNow enabled Activision to pinpoint a conflict between its CD copy protection mechanism and a popular CD-burning program that was causing its customers trouble. This allowed Activision to fix the problem and to create more informative error messages in its software.

Activision has taken the additional step of having customers use a specialized diagnostic utility to capture key PC configuration data when their problems aren’t immediately solvable. That data is then attached to a RightNow incident report, allowing level two technical staff to quickly pinpoint problems and discover issues that are affecting segments of its customer base.

“When tech support can easily and accurately identify customer concerns, the company can respond more quickly and decisively to emerging problems,” declares Hill. “That, in turn, leads to a higher-quality product and a more satisfied customer.”

On demand delivery model supports cost-containment strategy

In addition to its sophisticated functionality, Activision was also attracted to RightNow’s on demand delivery model for two reasons. First, the on demand model enabled Activision to implement an integrated, multi-channel service environment without having to invest in additional IT infrastructure, or take on the burdens of software and systems ownership. Second, it enabled the company to provide secure access to that environment from any PC with an internet connection.

This second reason was particularly important to the company because it hires qualified gaming enthusiasts to handle email support as independent contractors. This contracting arrangement enables the company to handle peaks in support volume without having to add permanent staff. It also provides a means of servicing customers during off-hours without having to hire a second and third shift.

With RightNow, these contractors perform their work using the same system as Activision’s in-house staff—so there’s no problem if the customer asks a follow-up question, or if the incident requires escalation. Additionally, because contractors have full access to Activision’s RightNow knowledge base, they can answer questions with the same precision as Activision employees. The system also enables the company to track every contractor’s performance.

“Our outside contractors are extremely productive because they have easy access to all of the information and support they need in order to respond to customer inquiries,” says Hill. “Using RightNow, we can manage these contractors as though they were working under our own roof.”

Hill adds that RightNow has been an exemplary business partner as he continues to refine the company’s support processes and further improve Activision’s customer experience. “Whether we’re tweaking our escalation rules, or executing a major software upgrade, I know from experience that RightNow will come through for us,” he says. “They provide the kind of service that every company should aspire to.”