New help for an old institution
Founded in Edinburgh in 1768, The Encyclopaedia Brittanica can look back with pride on its rich history, but when it comes to dealing with corporate challenges, the company also looks ahead to find the best answers.
Faced with a monthly bill of more than $35,000 for providing technical support to its customers, Britannica began to search for a way to lower that expense and maintain service levels. When the company started distributing its encyclopedia products on CD in 1989, the U.K. operation hired an external call center to provide a free help line for users’ technical questions. By 2000, however, the problems of supporting multiple versions, editions and formats for an ever-increasing number of customers had resulted in huge support costs.
“The situation was no longer viable,” says Magdalena Jakubowicz, IT manager for Britannica in the United Kingdom. “With around 2,000 calls each month, the cost to us of providing free support averaged [$17] per call, for a product that has a retail price of [about $70]. If we were to continue competing with the likes of Microsoft, we had to do something quickly.”
Switching to chargeable support through a premium rate telephone help line was one possibility, but the company also wanted customers to still have free access to help. Therefore, Britannica decided on a compromise that included implementing a Web-based self-help service--that would allow customers to download answers to their questions free of charge--and introducing premium-rate telephone support for those who preferred that type of contact.
Knowledge management technology was the obvious tool for the Web service, so Jakubowicz started to evaluate available options, finally choosing Gemini Knowledge Server from Gemini Affinitas , which incorporates Deskartes from Knowledge Management Software. The installation was completed in December 2000 and went live just two weeks later.
According to Jakubowicz, good preparation was key to the speed of implementation. Her team analyzed all the calls logged by the external call center for six months prior to going live to identify the nature of the calls and to prepare documents that would provide comprehensive solutions. They were then loaded into the knowledgebase, and the time between installation and implementation was spent “training” the system to give appropriate solutions to frequently asked questions.
Since January, support requests have been reduced to around 1,000 per month, half of which are received via the Web service. Telephone call volumes average around 500 per month--a 75% reduction from the previous 2,000 calls averaged.
Offering the free, round-the-clock Web support service enabled Britannica to reduce the hours for the premium rate telephone support service. Together with the greatly reduced volume of calls, the monthly bill for the external call center has been reduced to about $7,000, of which one-quarter is recovered from premium rate income. That represents a savings of about $28,000.
Jakubowicz and her technical assistant continually analyze the unanswered questions to learn more about what customers need to know, and add two or three new documents per week to the knowledgebase “By continually reviewing the questions asked, we can ensure a good success rate for the Web service,” says Jakubowicz.
And how have customers reacted. She responds, “A very small minority--those who were used to unlimited free telephone support--have resisted the changes, but most people are very impressed with the new Web service. They like the fact that they can quickly access answers at any time of day, and that they receive comprehensively documented solutions.”