Customer Success Story
Ask.com Responds to Customers
with a Complement of Self-Service
Convenience and Personalized Care
Challenge
• As a top U.S. internet site in terms of
traffic with more than 100 million
monthly global visitors, Ask.com
was looking for a way to effectively
provide convenient self-service
answers complemented with
responsive personalized, full-service
customer care.
.........................................
Results
• Queries are resolved in an average
of 1.5 hours compared to 8 hours.
• Ask.com’s self-service knowledgebase now receives thousands of
monthly pageviews with up-to-date,
easy-to-find answers.
• The number of repetitive questions
submitted via Ask.com’s online
help desk has been reduced by
60% through self-service deflection.
.........................................
“The changes Parature has enabled us to make through timely, personal
customer engagement with our users is pretty remarkable. Parature has allowed
us to bridge the gap between wanting to deliver a good customer experience and
actually doing it.”
- Eric McKirdy, Ask.com Global Customer Care Manager
A Brand with Great Customer Service Expectations
Ask.com is a top ten U.S. Internet site with 100 million monthly global visitors. Its
mission is to efficiently - and effectively - answer the millions of questions it gets from
visitors with the best information derived from around the web and from real people.
The immensely popular site also regularly fields questions from its community about
the Ask.com user experience. The company wanted answers to these questions to
be easily accessible online, and if the answer was not already available, to be able to
respond in a timely, personlized manner.
The reality, however, was that answers were not easily accessible via the site’s
current knowledgebase. Eric McKirdy, Global Customer Care Manager at Ask.com
recalls, “Not enough thought was given to the user experience of finding and
reading the articles, and the end result was that users were submitting a tremendous
amount of support tickets because they could not find answers to
their questions.”
Ask.com was using a solution from a major CRM provider, but was not happy with the
system’s limitations. Changes and updates to the knowledgebase were taking two to
three weeks to make, and responses sent to Ask.com visitors appeared
computer-generated and impersonal. Customer service became more reactive,
especially as the content in the knowledgebase quickly became outdated. For other
sites, this might have remained acceptable, but not for Ask.com.
Snapshot
Ask.com Responds to Millions with Greater Care
Organization: Ask.com
A brand built around responsiveness, Ask.com knew it needed to revamp its
customer service approach and replace its current CRM system. One of the
companies Ask.com decided to evaluate in its search was Parature. Immediately,
McKirdy says, he saw a difference in Parature’s approach to customer service versus
its previous CRM provider. “Parature assured me they would always work to fit into
Ask.com’s needs, not make us adapt to what fit best for them. I knew instantly this
would be the right approach for us. Parature essentially gave us a working canvas
and a paintbrush, so I could design our customer support portal exactly how it should
be.”
Industry: Digital Media
Location: Oakland, CA
Website: www.ask.com
Customer Since: 2012
Parature, from Microsoft
Customer Success Story
Ask.com’s new knowledgebase solution made it easier to update articles and information, and made answers easier to find. Content
additions and updates were fast and simple using Parature, and Ask.com users never needed to leave the Ask.com domain when
searching for answers or submitting tickets which increased ease-of-use and trust.
Ask.com now delivers real-time, well-organized self-service content that is easy to find using a combination of Parature’s EasyAnswer™
auto-suggest feature and automatic search engine indexing. Because so many users are now finding answers to Ask.com’s most common
questions without having to request assistance, McKirdy notes Ask.com can now increase its focus on those inquiries that are unique,
complex, or need a personal and thoughtful reply, which has always been Ask.com’s goal. Instead of spending time reactively responding
to an incredible volume of tickets generated by repetitive questions, McKirdy can provide more personalized care and direct feedback
from visitors to the right people in product development for continued improvement of the Ask.com site.
When Ask.com visitors do submit a unique or complex question via Ask’s online portal or email, Ask.com is now able to respond
personally, and has already shaved hours off its average response time. Since Ask.com deployed Parature, its noticeable improvement in
proactive and personalized service has added to the Ask.com experience - from a support portal designed with the user and convenience
in mind, to support ticket conversations that don’t resemble traditional support ticket responses in any way, shape or form.
Delivering
the Results the Company and Its Customers Asked For
•
Ask.com saw measurable results immediately from using Parature including:
•
•
a 60% reduction in the number of online tickets submitted within just two months of implementing Parature.
a reduction in the average ticket response time from 8 to 1.5 hours, with just one person responding to all tickets.
thousands of pageviews and increased adoption of Ask.com’s 24/7 self-serve knowledgebase.
In addition, with Parature for Mobile, Ask.com can now respond to support questions anywhere, anytime. McKirdy no longer has to lug
around a laptop and hope for Internet connectivity when answering support tickets or checking their status after hours or off-site. With his
mobile device, he answers questions remotely whenever he wants or needs.
Ask.com has also realized great success using Parature as part of its Hall of Fame initiative. Ask.com’s analytics team finds top 100
contributors for the month based on response quality, and sends them an Ask.com Hall of Fame t-shirt. Before Parature, the notification
came from a CRM system-generated email with lots of numbers and symbols which usually went straight to the recipient’s spam filter.
Response rates hovered around 35%. Now, with Parature, McKirdy can send an email to 100 people that looks like it’s coming personally
from him. The response rate is now 90% and has had great brand impact for Ask.com.
“Parature has allowed us to bridge the gap between wanting to deliver a good customer experience and actually doing it,” says McKirdy.
“The changes Parature has enabled us to make through timely, personal customer engagement with our users is pretty remarkable.
Parature has given us a multi-channel platform to deliver answers to our customers anytime, from anywhere. Now that’s what I call great
service.”
Parature, from Microsoft