Tom is one very smart tiger. The University of Memphis, in Tennessee, has a Bengal tiger as its sporting mascot, and this impressive creature heads up the advice section of the university’s website via own page entitled “Ask Tom”. The scope and variety of academic life, and perhaps more important the practical difficulties many students encounter in their first venture out of the family nest, mean Tom is always in demand. But both unexpected events and regular elements of the university timetable can lead to a surge in activity from month to month. His workload is handled courtesy of the CRM software company RightNow, which supplies the engine that drives the university’s relationship with 20,000 students and 2,000 staff.
Joe Matesich, director of the University of Memphis web and portal services, explained that the decision to employ RightNow came as he wrestled with the need to answer and handle phone calls from students and prospective students. The admissions office was facing a growing volume of queries and needed computing firepower to get the job done.
The implementation of RightNow was carried out in the conventional manner, with CRM software installed and operated onsite. Initially, it was limited to the enrolment of students, but as Mr Matesich notes, a friendly CRM interface can cut down on the need for phone calls. “We found out that so many of the questions that came in via the phone could be dealt with via a CRM tool and the call volume dropped by 75 per cent!” That was when the university decided it was time to take Tom campus-wide.
CRM should be able to scale up to meet peaks in demand. This principle was put to the test very early in the life of Ask Tom. Early in January 2002, Memphis, unusually for the southern US, was hit by a substantial snowstorm,. With a high proportion of the student body still away from campus, the website was engulfed in queries from vacationing undergraduates. How would the system cope?
“A snowstorm this fierce was unusual for Tennessee,” Mr Matesich recalls. “Questions flowed in: ‘Is the university closed? What should I do?’ We were able to keep Ask Tom updated as the position changed, letting people know when we expected classes to reopen.” The experience taught the university some practical lessons in how to run a crisis Q&A service. Keeping answers brief is one useful tactic, Mr Matesich observes.
RightNow was able to meet this peak in demand with ease, endorsing its customer’s faith in the online CRM argument, and this seasonal emergency had a hidden benefit. It introduced a much wider section of students to Ask Tom. The CRM site was established as a first-stop shop for all inquiries.
But despite the proven benefits of the system there was still a drain on staff resources from running Ask Tom on campus. “We didn’t want to tie up our staff as Ask Tom grew,” says Mr Matesich. The obvious answer was to opt for the online CRM model, where the entire software program is hosted away from the client’s own location, on the supplier’s hardware, and accessed via the internet.
The university had its reservations about the still relatively novel online approach to a large system. “One concern was the reliability of the database core of the system, and we did hedge our bets for a while, running a daily copy of the entire Q&A database that we kept here,” Mr Matesich recalls. Today, that practice has been dropped, as RightNow has proved its reliability and the university’s IT personnel have been freed up to work on other web-based services. The switch to hosted software was made in 2003 and Ask Tom has just grown in popularity with an average of 50,000 queries logged every month.
What advice can this hosted CRM customer give to other organisations thinking of taking their customer-facing services offsite? Mr Matesich is quick to point out that his university is still using a lot of conventionally-installed software. “We have many, many products on our premises and only a few hosted by suppliers. Our experience with RightNow is based on the quality of this particular vendor.” He admits to problems with hosted software from another vendor he prefers not to identify. “There are tremendous advantages to the hosted model as long as the vendor remains responsive,” he concludes.
RightNow remains invisible to the prospective and current students. That is how CRM should be, with the digital wizardry hidden behind a simple and effective interface.
