1-800-FLOWERS.COM implemented KANA Response so that email communication would be the same fast, high quality experience for customers that it is when they order over the Internet. Within six months, agent productivity leapt by 35%. As many as 200 CSRs use KANA Response to reply to customer emails.

1-800-FLOWERS.COM has been involved in e-commerce since 1992. Over the years the company's investment in the Internet channel has grown. Many customers use email to ask questions or make requests. At first the company's Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) used conventional methods to reply. The volume of business conducted over the Web grew fast however, as did the volume of associated emails.

"As an Internet forerunner, we felt we needed to provide our customers with the same fast response time to their emails that they're used to over the Internet," said Meredith McArdle, Director of Customer Service. "Therefore we looked carefully at the solutions industry had to offer for automating and streamlining email response."

"We found KANA Response to be head-and-shoulders the best on the market," McArdle continued. "KANA Response does so much more than just automate the reply process. It creates powerful reports that enable us to understand and trend customer issues. For our CSRs it combines speed with flexibility, allowing them to respond very quickly even when they need to make changes to standard replies. It
also makes it easy to keep customers informed of changes and important news."

1-800-FLOWERS.COM claims they deployed KANA Response in one month, with no assistance other than a training course and the documentation provided by KANA.

"The implementation phase was lots of fun," reported McArdle. "To take best advantage of KANA Response's power and flexibility, we analyzed the types of issues we wanted to track and then built a corresponding set of categories of information to be reported. Based on the results, we then refined the categorization. Of course, you're never finished. There are always new needs, new trends to track and new issues to evaluate. Fortunately KANA Response makes it easy to change and add new categories when they're needed."

"One of the things we like best about KANA Response is that our users have all the same powers and capabilities that we do in management," McArdle said. "One defining aspect of the company is that we believe strongly in empowering our CSRs as fully as possible to do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer, and KANA Response is a perfect fit with that philosophy."

"Within six months, CSR productivity improved by 35%," reported McArdle. "Since we have as many as 200 users during the peak holiday season, that amounts to a big dollar savings. But that's just the beginning of the financial benefits of KANA Response to 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. The reports have made it clear where there are common customer issues that account for a lot of the back-and-forth emails, and so we've put many of the answers to these issues on our self-help area of the website. That's a big time saver that's over and above the 35%. More important than these direct cost savings is the fact that our customers are delighted with their ease of communication and our fast, responsive service, which brings them back over and over."

1-800-FLOWERS.COM say they a long-established goal of replying to a majority of all email inquiries within two hours. KANA Response is helping them meet and exceed their goals. In one recent month their response rate hit 95%.

"There's so much we like about KANA Response, and KANA keeps making it even better," said McArdle. "They've added an incredible array of enhancements over the three years we've owned it, especially in the area of empowering users to easily change and establish rules. Everything is interactive and real-time. We can go online and see statistics and trends as they're happening. We can make a change that's designed to improve customer satisfaction, and sit right there and watch how well it's working - almost instantaneously. KANA Response does all the work for you. It also makes it easy for us to collaborate with other departments. We can forward emails to them and not worry about these emails getting lost because the system automatically raises a flag to tell us when it's time to get back to them."

"Before acquiring the latest upgrade, we took another look at the industry just to make sure our original conclusions were still valid," McArdle concluded. "We found that KANA Response had the functionality we needed to meet our customers' needs."