Success Story: Gannett Company

Summary

The Gannett Healthcare Group used TrackVia to increase its level of customer satisfaction by automating its service and support workflow and enabling its nationwide team to simply and securely share the status of customer requests. The result has been an unqualified success:

• Business Impact: Dramatic increase in management visibility resulting in commensurate increases in team performance and customer satisfaction

• Cost Savings: Approximately 90% cost savings versus CRM application

• Setup Time: 3 days

“The quality of our customer service has improved substantially since implementing TrackVia. Our ability to manage the quality of our customer follow-up has increased dramatically.”
-- Ken Ramirez, VP of Sales & Marketing

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Challenge

The Gannett Healthcare Group, division of $7B Gannett Company, is a nursing and healthcare communications company that educates tens of thousands of professionals per year. It has become one of the healthcare industry’s leading educational organizations by providing exceptional training content and customer service.

To continue its rapid growth, Gannett must continually improve customer satisfaction levels in order to benefit from positive word-of-mouth. The first step towards this goal was adding sales representatives and customer service agents to its nationwide team. In scaling the customer service organization, however, Gannett encountered the following challenges:

• Customer orders had grown to a rate of several hundred thousand per year

• The existing method for tracking service requests using Google Docs Spreadsheet created data inaccuracies due to its lack of relational capabilities and – this issue was compounded by the increasing order volume

• Lack of accurate data limited management’s ability to (1) monitor and improve the performance of individual service agents, (2) measure group performance to predict overall satisfaction levels and the time when additional staff would be needed, and (3) proactively address risks with certain accounts before they became major issues

• Insufficient IT resources to develop an in-house application

These challenges prompted Ken Ramirez, VP of Sales and Marketing, to search for a current generation solution that would be inexpensive to own, simple to deploy / maintain, and easy for nationally distributed team to use.

Solution

Ramirez was already familiar with traditional databases such as Microsoft Access and knew that those solutions are not easily or securely shared across a mobile, geographically dispersed workgroup. He also considered using a third party CRM application but realized that it would be too cost prohibitive. Ultimately, he turned to TrackVia which provided him with an online database that allowed his team to do the following:

• In days, create a relational database – without involving IT – that (a) manages the entire customer service workflow, allowing agents to accurately track creation, status, and closure of all requests; (b) easily shares access to data and communicates workflow status among a nationally distributed team via a Web-based, or cloud computing, delivery model; and (c) securely controls access to columns, records, and fields

• Easily create agent specific dashboards which are used throughout the day to (a) monitor actions required and exceptions raised down to the customer level; (b) highlight service requests at risk of missing their committed dates; and (c) enter actions taken on specific customer requests

• Create reports that allow management and sales to trend and analyze service levels across various dimensions such as by customer, agent, and group

With TrackVia, Gannett’s nationwide team of sales and service representatives is now able to able to accurately track and manage service request volumes approaching, and sometimes exceeding, 100 per day.

Benefits

Implementing TrackVia to manage its customer service workflow and communicate service status to a nationwide team has been a tremendous win for Gannett Healthcare. Agent productivity and morale improved substantially as each representative now has the information necessary to satisfy a much higher percentage of customer requests by the committed time. TrackVia has also given management and sales the ability to monitor service levels on both an individual and aggregated basis. Moreover, they are able to use TrackVia’s simple reporting and search capabilities to monitor up-to-the-minute customer status, proactively remedy issues before they become problems, and accurately plan for staff increases.

Overall, management’s ability to ensure high quality in customer service has improved dramatically leading to a commensurate improvement in customer service. Gannett has been able to realize these benefits at a cost that is approximately 90% less than using an existing CRM package like SalesLogix.