RightNow goes back to university
RightNow Technologies has gone back to university - twice over - having installed its CRM product at the University of West Florida (UWF) to support the expansion of its new online campus, and its helpdesk system at the University of New Mexico (UNM) to keep efficiency up while staff reductions take place.
When the RightNow CRM system is in place, UWF hopes to more effectively market its distance learning services and better serve the needs of its active students across the USA.
The university is planning to implement the on-demand CRM suite because relationships with prospective students often need to be maintained for up to two years while they complete prerequisite courses at community colleges. UWF also hopes to significantly increase the sophistication with which it targets marketing campaigns for its various online offerings.
According to Karen Barth, coordinator of the UWF Online Campus, said. "RightNow's on-demand model was highly appealing to us, since we cannot divert capital or human resources to IT infrastructure when it is so much needed elsewhere in our organisation."
And in New Mexico The UNM's RightNow-based help desk system provides end-user support for a major new application, allowing the university's IT department to leverage its distributed technical staff, resulting in a saving of at least two 'full-time equivalents' (the equivalent of two full-time staff)
By enabling more effective end-user support during the university-wide roll-out of Sunguard's SCT Banner (the new college administration application), the university says the helpdesk accelerated its time-to-benefit and improved the overall ROI significantly. UNM has subsequently extended its use of RightNow's application to support its broader IT services portfolio.
One of the biggest challenges for UNM was the dispersion of its IT department across the University's campus. Before deploying the helpdesk solution, physical dispersion of staff made it difficult for IT team members to collaborate on help desk enquiries. But with the application's thin-client (web browser) architecture, technicians could handle any incident at any time regardless of where they happened to be. Danny Lee, UNM's enterprise service management analyst, said: "This is a powerful customer service environment that lets us keep our costs down while we still deliver quality support."
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