Case Study: RightNow best practices help BA maximise its return on investment

"Usage uptake suggests that the web is becoming the preferred customer service channel and this is having a direct impact on reducing calls to agents. There’s a cost saving associated with this. We calculate that every 10 items viewed during a RightNow customer service session saves BA a call. If we attach a value to that call we can estimate our return on investment."
- Chris Carmichael, Technical Editor at BA.com

Customer Name
British Airways

Challenge

	Extend ROI and reduce operational costs via deeper product utilisation
	Improve consistency of customer service to Executive Club members across all contact channels
	Continue enhancing the customer experience

A few years ago BA embarked on its relationship with RightNow Technologies creating AskBA, a customer service implementation that answered 55,000 customers’ questions every week. This was at the forefront of the airline’s vision of a customer enabled ba.com where the web plays a pivotal role in allowing customers to serve themselves to everything from booking a flight, holiday or car, to checking-in online, changing their booking and printing their own boarding pass.

Now in the present day, BA continues to develop and extend its customer enabled ba.com and looks to RightNow’s on demand CRM technology to help it deliver the vision, as Chris Carmichael, Technical Editor, at BA.com explains:

“A key element of a customer enabled ba.com is that dealing with us should be so easy that customers can choose to serve themselves. The original RightNow deployment was certainly assisting us with this; it was also helping to drive down operational costs by reducing dependency on the contact centre, while at the same time benefiting customers. However, from talking to RightNow we knew that we could squeeze more out of our investment.”

“A top priority was to explore the ways we could exploit the asset to deliver increased utilisation,” continues Carmichael. “We were looking for improved ROI above and beyond that already experienced with a continued focus on driving out even more cost from the contact centre. We wanted all of this with the additional and important caveat of improving the customer experience.”

To help BA achieve its goals RightNow’s vertical sector consultants recommended implementing a series of tried and tested best practices, gathered from working with blue-chip enterprises across various different sectors, as well as more than twenty different airlines. These have been designed to ensure RightNow’s customers maximise their return on investment and enhance the benefits delivered by the technology.

Specifically, best practices gained with e-commerce customers seemed to align closely with a customer-enabled BA and RightNow made the following three recommendations:

1. A RightNow driven search function on the home page and subsequent pages
2. Book Now buttons added to customer services pages for easy end-to-end transactions
3. A ‘manage my booking’ tab allowing customers to reach the new customer enabled functions

The overall effect provided clearer sign posting to important site areas and doubled utilisation of RightNow overnight, something fundamental to driving down operational costs:

“Usage uptake suggests that the web is becoming the preferred customer service channel and this is having a direct impact on reducing calls to agents,” declares Carmichael. “There’s a cost saving associated with this. We calculate that every 10 items viewed during a RightNow customer service session saves BA a call. If we attach a value to that call we can estimate our return on investment.”

While BA is not permitted to disclose actual figures saved from deflecting calls from the contact centre, it can confirm that the sum is substantial.

RightNow was confident that by activating the ‘Smart Assistant’ best practice further gains could be made. Smart Assistant reads a customer’s question, before they submit it via a web form, and proactively pushes additional answers to the customer. In many cases this resolves the customer’s enquiry by providing them with content that they may have over looked during their initial search.

“The returns from implementing the Smart Assistant best practice have been astonishing,” says Carmichael. “We budgeted for an email reduction of about 12%, our goal was of achieving 15%, so we were staggered by the 60% reduction. It’s exceeded our expectations and now our future goal is to have every inbound email come in via the Smart Assistant tool.”

By deflecting repetitive emails out of the contact centre, Smart Assistant again saves BA a sizeable sum of money each year. By managing email in this way, agent workloads have reduced, allowing them time to concentrate on the more complex problems, while responsiveness to customer-critical issues has improved.

One of BA’s most complex businesses is its Executive Club, a highly subscribed to loyalty programme segmented into three levels. Being able to provide effective customer service to members was proving challenging. There was no way of centralising the vast quantities of information about the club or capturing expert agent knowledge so it could be shared across multiple call centres and customer touch points. Neither was there a method of ensuring that information given to members was accurate regardless of contact channel or location.

With a RightNow-enabled customer contact centre BA was able to simplify internal processes so that all Executive Club-related information could be streamlined into a common system for use across multiple contact channels. The system allows agents to add their own expert knowledge, which can then be viewed by colleagues while on the phone or responding to emails. According to Carmichael the impact has been significant:

“Out of all the recent work we’ve done, the Executive Club exemplifies how we’ve managed to cost effectively maximise our use of RightNow. They’ve helped us take what is fundamentally a mountain of information and made the data within it useable for customers and agents. The result is a worldwide deployment offering consistency of experience across all customer service channels, feedback from users has been very positive.”

It’s little wonder that customer reaction has been good, especially when you consider that RightNow is also helping to provide synergy between BA’s internal departments. For example, the system enables details of Executive Club marketing campaigns to be made available to agents, readying them for any resulting enquiries and so helping to improve customer experience.

In fact, BA’s maturing relationship with RightNow has been so successful that other areas of the airline are also using RightNow’s on demand CRM to drive internal efficiencies, while other departments are preparing to do so. For example, the employee intranet uses RightNow to support its “Employee Self Service” programme, supporting staff as they move away from dependence on offline resources. While BA’s busy press office prepares to deploy RightNow to simplify and speed up the provision of information to journalists and investors.

“Our relationship with RightNow is now in its fourth year,” concludes Carmichael. “So after all this time, it’s very refreshing when a company is able to continue innovating with your investment so its usefulness continues to grow and deliver bigger and better returns.”

Results

	Increased customer utilisation drives out more calls from contact centre for heightened ROI
	RightNow-enabled contact centre improves customer service across Executive Club
	Depth and utilisation continues to grow and deliver benefits throughout organisation
	Ease of use and additional functions improve customer experience