RightNow® supports lastminute.com’s 5 star experiences with customer interaction knowledge

Published 24th August 2009

Goals:
- Develop a single record of customer interactions across multiple-channels
- Reduce the number of repetitive calls and emails into the contact centre
- Provide multi-language support to agents and customers

Achievements:
- More than a 50% email and 20% call reduction into the contact centre
- Customer self-service rate at 95%
- Crisis incidents responded to swiftly with timely and consistent information
- Agents able to record all customer information to develop personal customer service


Selling the ultimate in experiences
Now in its tenth year, lastminute.com continues to thrive and has grown into a worldwide business employing 1,981 staff. 2.5million people log onto lastminute.com every week to bag the best deals. One in every ten seats sold in West End theatres are via lastminute.com, this equates to 1.5 million tickets every single year. The site sells rooms from more than 80,000 hotels worldwide and flights across 300 airlines. And every year lastminute.com sends more than 750,000 people on package holidays.

From its inception, lastminute.com has believed that everyone should be able to experience luxury at an affordable price. That's why staff at lastminute.com wake up every day thinking of alternative ways to make their customers’ free time go even further. The customers’ experience is at the heart of everything they offer, whether it’s the opportunity to jet off to another country, experience a great day or night out in the UK, take pleasure in an ‘experience day’ relaxing at a spa or trying their hand at flying a light aircraft, lastminute.com want to ensure that their customers’ are having a fantastic time.

The 5 star service lastminute.com offers doesn’t just start when the event does; it begins with the premium website and continues till the end of the customer’s experience and beyond. Should the customer need to contact lastminute.com at any time, the 5 star treatment is the same however they choose to get in touch. That’s why the company sought a robust CRM system that would help to provide them with a 360 degree view of the customer interactions.

Julian Kent, Senior Customer Services Manager at lastminute.com explains why a full customer interaction record was an essential element of their selection criteria: “We needed a system that would support the personalised service that we want to offer each of our customers. A technology that not only records all customer interactions, but also supports customer and agent queries by providing them with knowledge, enabling a single view of customer interactions and as a result, a positive customer experience.”

Superb experiences across all interaction channels

Today 500 contact centre agents are using RightNow to track customer contact. Agents are based in North America, UK, Europe and Asia Pacific, providing support in eleven different languages; as such customers have round-the-clock support regardless of their location. In Italy and Spain, using RightNow, contact centre agents are supporting customers who want an online chat session with them. In the UK, lastminute.com is trialling the RightNow Chat function to support its more complex holiday package offers, for example, when customers want more guidance to confirm a holiday.

Chat, by design, gives customers the opportunity to receive instant support at the time when they most need it. The benefits of chat are clear for both agent and customer; as an agent you can have numerous chat sessions at once, resolving as many queries as possible, and as a customer there is an immediate response to your query whilst you are online; no need to break away from the site and pick up the phone. Put simply, chat directly supports a seamless customer experience and helps to convert ‘lookers to bookers.’

Over the past three years lastminute.com’s relationship with RightNow has expanded. Initially Holiday Autos, lastminute.com and Travelocity invested in RightNow to help customers self-serve via its websites. If the customer cannot find an answer to their question on site they can raise an incident. Initially this sends out an automated response with answer options, if this still doesn’t answer the customer’s question the system alerts an agent to get in contact. The ability for customers to get answers to their questions 24x7 is paramount, especially when they may be dashing to catch a late-night show, or flight, or making an impulsive, last minute purchase!

Customer’s contact history is critical to support positive experiences

Despite the majority of people wanting to communicate with the company either by phone or email there is still a small proportion of customers who write to lastminute.com. Letters are now scanned into the system and attached to the customer’s profile within the RightNow system rather than being in a filing cabinet somewhere.

Kent states, “It is important that customer interactions are captured no matter how they decide to contact us so that we can get a true view of customer interaction with us. RightNow helps us provide a seamless customer experience; for example if a customer writes to us and then follows up with a call, we are aware of their interaction history, regardless of the contact channel and can respond knowledgably, which ever agent answers the phone, resulting in a more satisfactory customer experience with a lot less frustration all round.”

Additionally, lastminute.com is using the system to deal with post-holiday enquiries; as Kent explains; “We are responsible for ensuring that our customers receive nothing less than excellent service. If there is a problem, we are not going to bury our head in the sand and ignore the customer; we are going to resolve the incident. RightNow supports this objective by enabling us to log the incident and deal with it immediately. The system also allows us to communicate with any affiliate services that may have been involved such as travel insurance, airport parking, and airport transfers. Transparency and resolution are critical when dealing with a frustrated customer.”

Reduction of repetitive emails and calls!

Since RightNow’s deployment on lastminute.com’s website and in its contact centre, more than 50% of emails and 20% of calls have been deflected, which has allowed contact centre agents to respond to more business and time critical queries. In addition, the ability for front line staff to offer customers a personalised service and access knowledge has meant that employee motivation is extremely high. Feedback from the agents has been extremely positive as they can now provide informed and consistent responses to customers.

Robust reporting is also crucial to Lastminute.com as it allows them to identify trends in customer interactions, enabling them to make smarter and faster decisions about the customer experience they provide. This insight is critical in the travel industry where external events; industrial action,, adverse weather conditions or security alerts, and the like, can result in frustration for the customer.

Kent says, “Recently, when a well known airline went bust, we were able to upload information on our site within less than an hour of hearing the news. As a direct result of running reports from RightNow, we were able to upload additional knowledge we knew customers wanted. Being able to react to a situation quickly and offer details that we know the customer is actually requesting is a great way of ensuring transparency and delivers a good customer experience.”

CRM via the Cloud

Another benefit of RightNow that it is on demand. “Having the technology supplied via the cloud ensures that it is constantly scalable to our needs,” comments Kent. “We were impressed with RightNow’s service levels so we knew that hosting with them was the best option. It also means that we are able to leave the technology to the experts and concentrate on our core business; providing 5 star experience for our customers at 3 star prices.”

Kent concludes;“Customer experience is central to everything we do, with RightNow we are able to ensure our customers get the personal, consistent and superb customer experience they deserve, no matter how they decide to communicate with us.”