Case Study: Priceline.com's New Customer Contact Center

Priceline.com (www.priceline.come ) is an American company that helps its customers obtain discounts on travel-related services such as airline tickets and hotel stays. The company is not a direct supplier of these services; rather, it helps its suppliers provide travel services to its customers.

Immediately before travel websites exploded in popularity Priceline was using customer management software that it developed in-house. The proprietary applications could not provide complete pictures of customers. Customer service agents had restricted access to transaction histories which severely limited their knowledge of the customers with whom they were speaking

As the online travel industry blossomed and pricing became cutthroat, Priceline had to be able to move fast. It needed to keep its customers informed of fast-moving price changes, new products, and changing travel regulations, no matter which method they used to contact the company. The new contact center had to expand as fast as the firm's customer base was growing while supporting significantly higher levels of interaction with each customer. Agents needed access to a list of frequently asked questions, among other content. To accomplish these goals Priceline moved the process of information management away from its information technology employees to the firm's marketing and product management departments so they could update the customer knowledge database and FAQs themselves.

Priceline developed its new contact center using KANA Software (www.kata.com which provides on-premise and cloud computing customer relationship management products. The contact center provides customer service agents with the ability to quickly manage high volumes of emails The center also connects customer contacts and Priceline's internal databases, including several by Oracle. This link enables Priceline agents to react rapidly and consistently by having access to a 360 -degree view of each customer. The contact center has predetermined rules that optimize responding to client inquiries and routing certain types of questions to the most knowledgeable customer service representative.

Visitors to Priceline's website can also help themselves to a knowledge base to answer the most common questions. Using the self-service option is often quicker for customers, and it reduces the number of calls to customer service agents, who can handle more complex phone Inquiries

Questions:

1. Discuss the reasons why Priceline needed a new customer contact conter.

2. Describe the benefits of the KANA solution to customers and to Priceline.