Case study: Photobox

Photobox has improved its IT systems to keep customers in the picture

Photobox aims to keep customers smiling by making it easier to get answers to queries

Online photo company Photobox has grown rapidly in the past few years, as consumer interest in creating personalised items using digital pictures has blossomed.

But that rapid increase in demand has also tested the company’s ability to track customer behaviour, says Renaud Besnard, director of UK operations for Photobox.

Over the past seven years, the company has grown 50 per cent year on year. Customer queries rocketed from about 50 per day to 2,000 – peaking at about 3,000 a day in the Christmas season.

“We felt the need to streamline the way we were dealing with customers’ requests for information,” says Besnard.

Managing a wide range of enquiries concerning products, orders, technical issues and site navigation via email or phone ate up valuable time. By deploying RightNow software, the company has improved its online support, increasing users’ ability to get the answer to their question and reducing the telephone support burden.

“We developed responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs) that made it easier for customers to access the information they needed, saving their time and ours. By giving customers the ability to access information in our knowledge database, it made them more likely to use FAQs than phone or email,” says Besnard.

He says the technology has improved information harvesting and made its search results more intuitive. “We can identify reasons why the customer is contacting us and can build the database accordingly, extract information and act on what we learn, such as adding new products. It is an intelligence tool that makes sense of a lot of overwhelming information created by thousands of customer contacts and is also a driver for business,” says Besnard.

That customer feedback provided critical insight as the company moved to a new web platform in May 2008.

“The change generated a lot of customer reaction through main threads and comments, and we could respond to that information – whether it was positive or negative – to make improvements and decrease complaints,” says Besnard.

The company has also set out to improve data quality. “We have achieved this by focusing on the knowledge database, the quality of content and feedback,” says Besnard.

The move has also reduced errors, such as using a photo of the wrong child on a product. “With up to 9,000 orders a day shipped from the UK factory, mistakes happen in about 2.3 per cent of cases as there is always the risk of a mismatch. It is a challenge, but we aim to reduce that figure to zero, and RightNow helps us to track complaints and understand what is causing problems,” says Besnard.