Case Studies — Canon

Canon Builds Loyalty Through Industry-Leading Customer Support

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Overview

Canon I.T.S. (CITS), a subsidiary of Canon USA, is responsible for supporting both consumer and commercial products. CITS receives hundreds of thousands of customer inquiries each month from consumers seeking help using Canon products.   Consumer questions range across Canon’s product line and were becoming increasingly complex as Canon’s cameras, copiers, and printers became more and more interconnected. “We needed to gather more information on customer use and satisfaction with our products,” stated Mike Larson, Assistant Director of Product and Process Quality.

CITS had been measuring customer satisfaction by conducting phone-based surveys. The call center sent customer issue files to a vendor who then conducted telephone surveys. Over the years, however, this method proved to be less and less effective for a variety of reasons. For example, people let an answering machine screen their calls, which has a negative effect on survey completion rate. Additionally, people are busier and have less time to offer for phones, limiting the data sampling and ability to drill down on the detail. “Phone surveys have a place and we still use them for certain activities. However, we knew we had to do a better job of capturing the voice of the customer details, while being smart in terms of process optimization and cost containment,” Larson said. A better approach was needed.

Upgrading to Online Survey Management

In late 2002, CITS began looking for a new survey and analysis partner that could help take Canon’s customer satisfaction to the next level. CITS’s requirements included acquiring detailed customer information, an easy-to-use online interface, comprehensive survey and analysis functionality, and reasonable cost. “Overall, CustomerSat’s hosted application provided the best blend of functionality, flexibility, and price,” he said.

In March 2003, CITS deployed CustomerSat Enterprise, CustomerSat’s hosted survey and analytics suite. CITS uses PeopleSoft CRM for telephone support and Kana Response for email support. Secure Internet protocols and CustomerSat’s CRM Connect™ software were used to integrate Enterprise with PeopleSoft and Kana. The integration provided Enterprise with detailed information, including product model, warranty status, along with the end result of the call. The CustomerSat system also captured the identity of the support employee who handled the call.

Every night the CITS PeopleSoft and Kana systems transmit customer and case information to CustomerSat Enterprise for all cases that were closed that day. The system applies business rules to ensure that enough customers are invited for results to be statistically significant. The system then sends personally addressed email invitations to each customer selected. CustomerSat Enterprise automatically collects and tabulates survey responses and generates charts, tables, trend lines, and statistics of survey results in real-time that Larson and his team access through secure online portals. Interactive dashboards allow Larson and his team to pinpointopportunities by product line, model, support representative and a host of other variables defined within the system. These features enable Larson to update management with reports containing detailed charts and graphs whenever he needs to: daily, weekly or monthly. Larson said, “With CustomerSat Enterprise, we can focus on building loyalty to the Canon brand by providing industry leading customer support.”

The CustomerSat system also enables call center operations supervisors to coach technical support agents for optimal performance. One of its main benefits is “the ability to pinpoint exactly what factors such as product knowledge, responsiveness, and courtesy contribute to or detract from an agent’s overall performance,” Larson said. This benefit is particularly helpful when a new product is released, or a new agent joins the force. Support representatives can log into the CustomerSat application and view their own survey results and customer comments about the experience. For privacy purposes, CITS restricts representatives from accessing other agents’ responses and from information that could identify customers. In addition, CITS management can search survey responses by problem area or model number. They can even search for specific words that customers use when they provide comments.

Customers can choose to forward their comments to their support representative’s supervisor and to senior management, who review comments on a weekly basis. CITS also uses trend lines, charts, and loyalty indexes, which are helpful in presenting the results to senior management.

CITS can make changes to the surveys anytime. While telephone surveys proved expensive to modify and difficult for technical support agents to access, using CustomerSat, survey changes are easy and each agent can have his or her own online dashboard to monitor performance. In addition, receiving real time results helps management learn quickly if a change made to correct an issue is working.

CITS also uses the Enterprise application to measure customer experiences with automated online support. An online support survey was recently launched and the results will be important in determining future activities Canon undertakes regarding support over the web.

Moving to the “Top of Class”

“The best part of CustomerSat Enterprise is that it really works,” Larson emphasized.   The CITS group was recently recognized for providing “top of class” satisfaction for its printers in PC World magazine’s Reader’s Survey in May 2004. Gaining this “top ranking” in customer satisfaction is no easy task for an organization’s call center. “Satisfaction and first contact resolution are at all time highs,” Larson noted, and he is confident that Canon will lead the pack in future industry surveys

Making the Grade throughout Canon

CITS also uses the CustomerSat system to survey its employees. “We conducted our first employee survey in late 2003, and it gave the management team insight into our business that they never had before. Satisfied employees create satisfied customers, especially in a support center environment,” Larson continued, “and using the system to measure employee satisfaction helps to gain employee buy-in to our customer satisfaction efforts.”