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Citrix Systems provides access infrastructure products that enable PCs, IP phones, and other devices to remotely and securely access applications across wired and wireless networks. The company also offers consulting, support, and training services. Citrix has more than 180,000 customers worldwide, ranging from individual professionals to multinational corporations; it also serves the government and education markets.
Reducing call volumes by helping customers self-serve
You upgraded your online community. Why?
Well, a third of our customers wanted to see us improve our support resources, specifically improving or replacing the knowledge base, UI, and customization. We quickly determined that a large amount of customers who would normally self-service were calling into our call centers. Since you already had something in place, how readily did management accept upgrading?
We are a very metrics-driven culture and our management wanted to see a profit/loss justification for the change. Our challenge was to keep the project cost low by obtaining the most effective long-term tools with the least amount of monetary and human expense. Ultimately, we had to show that this project would result in reduced inbound calls. Our goal was that the new community would reduce the volume by 15%. This would allow us to redeploy support personnel to free them to focus on support renewal and higher satisfaction and service scores.
Any other challenges worth mentioning?
Since we already had a few systems in place that fed support agents and the community, the solution needed to be not only cost-effective, but something that was highly customizable, feature rich and that could integrate with our existing content systems. This was way harder than we thought. Everything on the market was either too expensive or technically restrictive. We did a lot of thorough technical testing as well as market comparisons. Jive won hands down.
"Jive Software's products are extremely flexible and met our needs perfectly. And the no-nonsense approach to development was amazing: if they said it could be done, then it was done."
Saul Gurdus,
Director, Global Escalation Services, Citrix
So what can your community do that it couldn't before?
A lot. Users can now easily search the community for documents or conversations to answer their questions. As well, there's a huge increase in the peer-to-peer sharing of knowledge, questions, ideas and best practices. And our reps use the same system for direct interaction with the community in threaded conversations.
Back to metrics, now that you've been operating for a while, what have you seen?
First off, the project timeframe was extremely tight, but Jive hit the dates, even with some tough professional services customizations we were asking for. The project came in under our initial budget expectations. Not to mention that even after the first month we readily beat the 15% decrease in call volume. At this point it's more like 30%, and that's with a growing company. Our traffic has more than quadrupled, along with participation. And most importantly, our customers love it.
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