BOZEMAN, Mont., April 19, 2011 -- Global business services and suppliers provider Office Depot is working with RightNow (NASDAQ:RNOW) to optimize its contact center operation and improve the customer experience through all contact channels. The partnership with RightNow is part of a project to create a Europe-wide virtual contact center serving Benelux DACH, Spain, Italy, the UK, and Ireland, and is designed to drive efficiencies and improve responsiveness to customers.

Following a successful pilot phase that managed email interactions in the Benelux DACH region, Office Depot will use RightNow CX to manage interactions across its customer phone calls, emails and faxes, giving contact center agents a single view of each customer’s interaction history. Office Depot also plans to introduce RightNow Chat, which will offer customers real-time access to service agents, on every checkout page, to assist with any final questions prior to completing a purchase, so reducing abandonment rates.

The management of contacts through RightNow will be a major improvement over the existing process, as Alexander Jaross, Senior Manager Telesales and Contact Center Europe at Office Depot detailed: "Previously, we used Outlook to handle emails and a number of disparate systems to handle other customer contacts. The use of multiple systems that were disconnected was frustrating for both customer and agent. Customers did not receive a consistent experience across each channel. RightNow will support our goal to centralize customer channels, giving agents a single view of all contacts and allowing them to blend channels, for example dealing with email and the phone calls at the same time. We expect RightNow to drive efficiency and improve the service we deliver to our customers."

The deployment will support the virtualization of the regional and European contact centers, with the routing of interactions handled by Transera and management of customer interaction history provided by RightNow. "The project will allow us to route and record any customer request, phone, email, fax, etc., based on the needs of the customers, which will improve service levels," said Jaross.

Jaross explains that, having engaged with Transera, it became clear that RightNow was the ideal choice for completing the customer experience strategy. "Transera is a top notch virtual call center supplier and we saw RightNow on several reference visits managing multi-media channels. The integration of these two solutions will optimize our internal process and improve the customer experience. We were very convinced by the quality of RightNow."

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.businesswire.com