Getting good feedback
Editor’s note: Rajesh Nakhwa is North American technical support manager at Ariba, a Mountain View, Calif., e-commerce firm. Monica David is vice president of client services at CustomerSat.com, a Mountain View, Calif., research firm.
In today’s competitive climate of global e-commerce, customer loyalty is a key factor to success. Increasingly, companies are demanding immediate access to customer feedback in all aspects of their business experience. From initial purchase to product delivery and technical support, e-businesses realize that sustaining a healthy customer-oriented relationship is a full-time endeavor that requires constant feedback.
One such company, Ariba, Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform and network services provider, is using Web-based survey tools to improve customer retention. Ariba has integrated its Vantive Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system with the Web Survey System (WSS) of CustomerSat.com, a Mountain View, Calif., research firm, to enable its global customer-support division to collect real-time feedback, track trends, get immediate notification of less-than-satisfied customers, implement department-wide best practices procedures, and use positive responses to build team morale and customer loyalty.
Tremendous growth
On the strength of its Ariba B2B Commerce Platform - an open, end-to-end infrastructure of interoperable software solutions and hosted Web-based commerce services - the company is experiencing tremendous growth. It recently posted record revenues of more than $80 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2000 - up 101 percent from the previous quarter and 578 percent from the same period last year.
While Ariba can attribute its industry leadership position to numerous reasons, one key factor is its continued focus on maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. With response centers in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, Ariba staffs a full-service technical support team, which fields inquiries from customers around the globe via telephone, Web or e-mail. Through the use of the Vantive CRM system, Ariba assigns each customer inquiry a case number, routes it to an appropriate specialist, and professionally tracks it from initiation to resolution, at which time the case is closed.
Prior to using the Web Survey System, Ariba tracked customer satisfaction by sending quarterly e-mail surveys, asking customers who used technical support during the past three months about their support experience. As Ariba’s business expanded, and with increases in the diversity and volume of customer calls, its need for a real-time feedback system grew.
With the Web Survey System and its Vantive CRM integration module, Ariba’s customer satisfaction measurement program is now an integrated, real-time, two-way relationship, which has empowered Ariba to efficiently serve its growing customer base. “Customer satisfaction has been a key driver of Ariba’s phenomenal growth,” says Ariba CEO Keith Krach. “Online customer feedback helps us retain valued customers and build lifelong relationships with them.”
A customer service challenge
Prior to 1999, Ariba’s primary offering was one product - Ariba Buyer - an e-procurement application. Gathering customer feedback was accomplished quarterly through e-mail surveys. For Ariba’s customers, who generally had multiple inquiries regarding the same product, this methodology was sufficient, as customers could accurately relay their experiences even several months after the trouble case was closed.
Ariba found, however, that as the company expanded its offerings, it received a higher degree of unique inquiries from a broader range of customers. This change in technical support dynamics accelerated the need for a system that could help them evaluate the quality of their customers’ experience immediately after their technical support issue was resolved.
“We are now receiving many more calls from a more diverse customer base, each using different products. In the past, our total monthly call volume was generated by a relatively low number customers; 100 customers could have been responsible for 600 calls into the center,” says Ariba’s North American Technical Support Manager Rajesh Nakhwa. “It was fairly easy for those customers to recall their experiences in a quarterly survey. But as new products resulted in more single-time inquiries, we required a system that allowed our customers to give us instant feedback.”
With this information in hand, Ariba’s technical support managers knew they needed to better determine key drivers for customer satisfaction. In turn, they could implement employee training programs targeting specific client concerns, isolate best/worst practices scenarios, and more. Additionally, Ariba’s management thought if they could pinpoint a set of standard problem-solving strategies that were most effective in similar scenarios over time, they could standardize the solution - saving both time and money while improving the customer experience.
Ariba also determined it would be useful to isolate any technical-support trends specific to a certain customer parameter - such as the region where the customer was located, or product the client was using - to deal with them more efficiently. Customers in Asia-Pacific, for example, dealt with different challenges than customers in North America. Thus, Ariba needed region-specific solutions that could be implemented in its technical support system to better serve these distinct customer groups.
That was the missing ingredient in Ariba’s previous CRM system: a transaction-based, uniform, real-time customer feedback solution that could provide actionable information for Ariba employees at all levels. Furthermore, because of Ariba’s global reach, any system needed to be accessible on-line and include reporting capabilities tailored to fit Ariba’s employee needs. This type of solution would allow Ariba to streamline its processes and improve responsiveness to its customers.
The solution
CustomerSat.com provided a solution to Ariba’s challenges with its Web Survey System and automated CRM Integration Module. Working with Ariba’s technical staff, CustomerSat.com consultants were able to customize a transaction-based customer satisfaction survey system that integrated with Ariba’s existing Vantive CRM system (Fig. 1).
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Ariba customers are now invited to rate and comment on their technical support experience within 24 hours after the case is closed. This allows customers enough time to reflect on their experience while ensuring that the response accurately reflects their true feelings. The system deploys a personalized survey invitation via e-mail to each customer after the case is resolved, in accordance to business rules set by Ariba. When the case ticket is closed, CustomerSat.com’s CRM Integration Module saves contact and ticket information from the Vantive system to a file, which is then uploaded to CustomerSat.com’s Web site.
Typically, Ariba fields about 3,000 technical support inquiry calls a month. “We get calls as simple as ‘I can’t log in’ to very complex questions that take several days to resolve,” Nakhwa says. “Every inquiry, however simple or complex, gets an instant survey as soon as that case ticket is closed.”
The Web Survey System checks that each customer data record is complete and that e-mail addresses are meaningful (for example, containing an “@” and a “.”). The record is then encoded to ensure that only the invited customer can respond to the survey and respond only once. At that point, a customized e-mail survey invitation from Ariba is generated and sent to each customer (Fig. 2).
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To guarantee maximum response rates, the e-mail survey invitation and the survey itself are personalized, including Ariba’s company logo and customer-specific information such as first and last name, e-mail address, company name, case ticket number and case description, pertinent to each individual customer. Additionally, to facilitate candid responses, CustomerSat.com hosts the survey, assuring the respondent of confidentiality, if desired. The customer then clicks on the URL to view and complete the survey (Fig. 3).
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“A key driver for Ariba is respecting the customer’s time,” says Jose Ver, CustomerSat.com senior project manager. “Ariba is extremely concerned that the survey be brief; at most a few minutes should be required to respond, a message which was clearly conveyed in the invitation.”
Other demographics
Personalization of the survey invitation is a key component in generating survey responses from customers. But beyond that, Ariba wanted a host of other customer and case demographics to be uploadable from their CRM so that the views of survey results (the data that is actually displayed on the computer monitor or in printouts) could contain reporting data from a variety of perspectives. This required a system that allowed multiple methods of data filtering, “slicing and dicing,” as well as reporting capabilities and the ability to manage users through a master account holder.
Along with case number, case description, e-mail, name, and company name, the WSS can upload variables from Ariba’s customer information and case information databases including, address, region, technical support representative ID, product ID, date, time, etc. All of this data is sent to the WSS through the CRM Integration Module. This was a critical component for Ariba in its efforts to isolate trends in its technical support solutions. Ariba decides on which variables it uses to key its reports, based on its own business rules (Fig. 4).
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A range of real-time analyses and reports are available to Ariba’s authorized personnel at any time in Ariba’s password-protected account; they are always current as of the most recent survey response. The reporting system can display the survey information based on any number of variables, such as geography, call center ID, representative ID, product line, etc. In addition, these queries can be viewed in different chart formats (Fig. 5)
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Managing users
The Web Survey System allows hierarchical access to survey results, allowing a master account holder at Ariba to administer levels of access for other users. Through this feature, different regional and product managers may access and view customer feedback that is pertinent to their particular job responsibilities.
For example, a manager of a call center in Europe may need to see the survey data that involves calls handled throughout Europe as well as or within a specific region. Similarly, a product manager for the Ariba Buyer product line may only need customer feedback on that particular product. In addition, managers can compare these segmented views with the global view of data. The “controlled access and managed users” features make data analysis manageable and allow cross-segment comparisons. “The overall trends are important to the company at large, but I want to know specifically how my group is doing in relationship to the overall technical support division,” Nakhwa says.
Alerted immediately
In certain situations, Ariba wants to be alerted immediately about the results of a survey. For example, if a customer responds with a low satisfaction rating to a question asking for overall impressions of a technical support experience, Ariba wants to know about it and respond to the problem quickly. In these instances, an e-mail message is automatically generated by the WSS and sent to an appropriate representative at Ariba, who can then resolve the issue.
Ariba has experienced measurable results since implementing the new system, including:
- When Ariba receives a low overall satisfaction score, the representative can immediately contact the customer to determine the key reasons for the dissatisfaction. This has helped in resolving customer issues, and moved customers from dissatisfied to satisfied.
- Results have demonstrated to Ariba officials that customer satisfaction ratings of the technical support division have exceeded expectations.
- One of Ariba’s primary goals is to move customers rating their service as 7 or below (on a scale of 1 to 10) up the scale to a satisfied or very satisfied customer. Already, the open-ended customer comments portion of the survey have yielded immediate results in this area.
- The system has helped Ariba team morale. For the first time ever, Ariba customers can nominate representatives for excellent support services commendations through a question contained in the Web survey.
“This is a great way to measure and actually track and get trends so we can intervene before things blow up,” says Nakhwa, who was a lead contact for Ariba in bringing the system online. “We’ve found that sometimes a simple follow-up phone call or e-mail after the case is closed can be the difference between a customer being satisfied or very satisfied. So now, even if my representatives are 100-percent sure the solution worked, I tell them to give that extra call or send that extra e-mail. It makes a difference.”
And to Ariba, customer satisfaction makes all the difference.
Surveying the future
As an e-commerce provider, Ariba maintains a strong relationship with its customers. Its global technical support division, with offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, provides both regional as well as product-based expertise for its clients. Customer feedback will continue to be a critical driver in product support.
Ariba envisions a myriad of opportunities to expand its use of WSS. Cultural considerations when devising unique Web surveys and e-mail invitations, for example, will become more critical as the global economy expands. A Web-survey invitation written in French as well as English, for instance, is more likely to elicit a higher percentage of respondents than if it were written in English only when the audience is French-speaking.
Ariba also foresees the expansion of its WSS into all phases of its operation. As the task of assuring customer loyalty continues growing into a round-the-clock job - whereby every single customer experience is seen in the larger context of the customer’s ongoing relationship with the company - real-time feedback will play an even more crucial role. Down the line, Ariba envisions WSS becoming a 360-degree solution, where the survey information is fed back into Ariba’s CRM to be used by other departments, including sales, marketing and product development.
As the Internet continues to become more widely used as a customer support tool, conventional distinctions between receiving service, providing feedback on service, and customer-initiated training and development programs will continue to blur. All will present new challenges and opportunities, and Ariba promises to be at the forefront, striving to improve and sustain its strong customer relationships.