TaylorMade: Define the Job

When Rob McClellan joined TaylorMade-adidas Golf two years ago, one of the systems he inherited was the consumer response center, a rather unsophisticated email system. "Our agents would typically cut and paste responses to commonly asked questions: specifications on golf clubs, warranty issues, etc.," McClellan says.

But there were also some highly technical questions about golfing equipment that had to be routed to TaylorMade engineers. "I had no visibility into the process," McClellan says. "Things like quality of response and timeliness were a complete mystery. We could have a consumer on the cusp of making a big purchasing decision, and I had no way of knowing whether we delivered the right information or thoroughly annoyed the person."

McClellan knew he needed to upgrade the email support system, but before he went shopping for software he made sure he understood what he was trying to accomplish. "We had some clearly defined criteria," McClellan says. "We needed to track performance and productivity. I had to have visibility. I also wanted to validate ROI in less than twelve months. Without that I would not have been able to get approval for the capital request. And, finally, we needed a feedback loop in place that could validate the effectiveness of the system."

McClellan chose Kana Software due to its strength in email customer service. "Kana is particularly good in email management and Web routing," says Elizabeth Hurrell, an analyst with the Giga Information Group.

TaylorMade implemented the software in July 2001, and so far McClellan is pleased. "We have a 100 percent increase in productivity and we have recouped 100 percent of our investment."

He justifies these figures with the fact that email volume has doubled and TaylorMade can handle it with the same staff of two full-time agents. These are hard dollars, easy to measure, but he also thinks there are more soft dollars in savings and increased profit that are harder to quantify.

McClellan credits much of this success to the software, but he also says that if you do not attend to the primary directive in best practices, the best software in the world will not help you much. "Set your objectives," he says. "If you don't have the discipline to do this then you could end up using Kana the same way you use any email client, and then you have just bought a very expensive email system."

BMC: Manage Your Knowledge

Weaving corporate knowledge into your solution is one of the most important contact center best practices, according to Ike Mitchell, principal consultant at CSC, the consulting and outsourcing giant in El Segundo, Calif. "Knowledge management is a huge part of CRM and contact centers," Mitchell says.

And this is especially true for a company like BMC Software Inc. The Houston firm sells several different lines of enterprise software. It takes a deep knowledge base to support this kind of complex product line.

Typically, as was the case with BMC, the knowledge about such products and services is there, somewhere inside the company, but making it available to the right person at the right time is a challenge. "This is one of the reasons we chose Attenza," explains Ken Skinner, vice president for customer support at BMC. "They helped us find the knowledge items that our customers need to solve common problems."

BMC rolled out its first Attenza customer support site in February 2002. It is Web-based, support software that runs in a full application service provider (ASP) hosted mode. "We liked Attenza's ASP model," Skinner says, "since this put a minimal impact on our IT organization."

The site, which provides service and support for BMC's backup and recovery product line, SQL Backtrack, took about six weeks to implement. The software is fully branded so BMC customers never know they are leaving the BMC Web site when they start looking for answers.

Preliminary ROI figures are in. "We have seen the caseload on SQL Backtrack [cases handled by live customer service agents] decrease by ten percent, since we went fired up the site," Skinner says.

Skinner also hopes to get some more compelling ROI statistics. "We would like to verify that a Web interaction really did prevent a call to a live agent. This is hard to prove, but Attenza has analysis tools to help us do this......"