CRM - March 2008 - (Page 43)

TRAVELOCITY’S NEW TRAVELING COMPANION Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome will be getting some help from text analytics. In its ads, the Web-based travel agency’s whimsical mascot doggedly protects customers’ plans. Now a new initiative monitors customer surveys and email, allowing more responsiveness, according to Don Hill, Travelocity’s director of customer advocacy. Travelocity gets as many as 30,000 customer satisfaction surveys a month and up to 50,000 emails, along with 500,000 calls to its contact centers and a torrent of online discussion about the company. Much of it’s lost: Due to the volume, only some is ever seen—and even less is thoroughly analyzed. The sampling provided insight, but the company wanted more. “We realized we needed to listen very carefully to customer feedback,” Hill says. That meant analyzing every communication. The firm chose Attensity, thanks to a flat fee and a solution easily integrated with existing CRM data. “Companies [are] going beyond structured data,” says Michelle de Haaff, Attensity’s vice president of marketing and products. “If you take the time to do a survey… you expect the company to listen.” The system’s not yet fully up, but a successful pilot—live data fed into Attensity’s system—produced solid early results: Now, if a customer emails to complain about a hotel, not only will that be seen by someone who can take action, the hotel in question can be isolated and cross-referenced to see if it’s had similar problems in the past. Analytics also revealed people writing in for information about travel deals like the one they just booked—a marketing opportunity—or complaining about factors out of Travelocity’s control (such as weatherdelayed flights). “We’re finding out new things we didn’t think to ask, as well as what we did ask,” Hill says. —Ryan Davis Quixtar’s Quick Fix W hen entrepreneurs want to have a Web-based business of their own, many of them—especially those selling health and beauty products— turn to Quixtar, a self-styled “businessopportunity company” launched in 1999. To help tend to its far-flung clientele, the Grand Rapids, Mich.–based firm—the e-commerce sister company to the higherprofile Amway, and a subsidiary of Alticor— wanted easy-to-use business intelligence (BI) that would enable managers to receive executive summary reports; novice users to navigate and learn the application; power users to perform detailed ad-hoc analyses; and technology staff to oversee it all without adding any additional personnel. Quixtar already had BI, but wasn’t making the most of it: Users needed to know too much in order to build basic reports. Even many experienced users were over- An easy-to-use business intelligence project sparks innovative reporting without additional personnel whelmed by the cumbersome legacy system’s hundreds of parameters, and the limited capability to drill deeper into results. “They were confused what attributes and metrics to use for their analyses,” says Mark Wetters, senior BI analyst for Quixtar. “So only a few [of our] dedicated business analysts could use it.” To expand the user base, the new system had to cater to varying skill sets—from novice to veteran. “By combining the right data level with the right functionality, we could create positive user experiences with our BI application,” he says.“We would also have more efficient users and successful ad-hoc users.” Quixtar didn’t have to look very far for a solution. For several years, the company had been using applications from MicroStrategy, a McLean, Va.–based BI vendor. By upgrading to MicroStrategy’s Web Professional application and customizing some of its functionality, Quixtar was able 43 www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | MARCH 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - March 2008

CRM - March 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Re-shoring Contact Centers NetSuite’s Sweet Ride Takes Another Turn SaaS X.0? destinationCRM Dashboard Retailers Dream Big Detroit: Driven to Distraction Required Reading The Markets Within the Masses In Search of... Selling CRM to Your Sales Force Quixtar’s Quick Fix Travelocity’s New Traveling Companion Chasing Down First-Call Resolution Governing Better Marketing Secret of My Success Re: Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - March 2008

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