Bengaluru: Mumbai-based Bigtree Entertainment Pvt. Ltd—the country’s first entertainment ticketing company that offers ticketing for cinemas and plays through its website www.bookmyshow.com—successfully navigated the dotcom boom and bust, and lived through the personal computing era over the last 16 years of its existence.
Now it has begun facing a whole new set of young consumers, who as digital natives whip out their mobile devices and want to buy tickets on the fly, putting a burden on legacy systems. The company’s manual e-mail system clearly did not fit the bill any longer since it was not addressing impatient customer queries about ticketing or entertainment events in realtime.
Bigtree Entertainment was, thus, left with no option but to consider building an e-ticketing system to improve customer experience. The company realized that it needed a centralized customer contact database to expand its communication channels to cater to features such as online chats. It also needed a tool to gain real time customer insights from all these communication channels, including its call centre and e-mail ticketing.
“Initially, we had no way of meeting a customers’ expectations and extending their lifespan with Bigtree, as we could not store any customer data and respond to queries efficiently,” said Komal Chainani, deputy general manager of contact center and back office operations at Bigtree Entertainment.
The company decided to implement a centralized contact database from Oracle Corp. With Oracle’s RightNow Chat cloud service, the Mumbai-based company improved the customer care response time to e-mails and phone queries by 30% within weeks.
The Oracle solution also helped Big Entertainment expand its customer base by delivering targeted, personalized interactions with new and existing customers to support return business.
“We now have a consolidated view of customer information and gain the ability to provide better service and improve our customer experience,” Chainani said.
The company also minimized inquiry bottlenecks and improved service availability by implementing an online chat service.
The unified, real-time customer contact platform also enhanced staff productivity by automatically assigning an inquiry reference number and providing access to all communication channels such as general ticketing inquiries, technology queries, and ticket purchase transaction records, and routing them to appropriate staff members in a single record with one click, rather than arduously recording information, as was done earlier.
Bigtree worked with Oracle’s partner Virtuos Solutions Pvt. Ltd to implement the RightNow cloud service in just three months.
“We benefitted from Virtuos’s deep understanding of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service. Today, we have a centralized customer contact database that fits our entertainment ticketing business model, and functionality for providing targeted and personalized service that helps us get the most out of our investment,” Chainani said.
A study commissioned by Oracle and carried out by Forbes Insights published in February notes that some companies are making significant progress delivering modern customer service while others are investing in online customer service capabilities, self-service technology, mobile apps, social media and knowledge management systems.
“Consumers today are engaged and empowered like never before and want to get answers to their questions anytime, anywhere, and on any device,” David Vap, group vice-president at Oracle Applications said in a statement.
He believes that excellent customer service involves consistent, personalized customer service in every interaction, across every channel, and at the same time it can have a huge business impact by helping organizations increase sales, strengthen relationships and reduce costs.
An October 2014 Gartner survey on customer experience revealed that by 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience versus 36% four years ago. That’s a big leap.
Needless to say, the cloud-based solution helped Bigtree Entertainment improve its overall customer service, and expand its customer base, thereby improving its profit.
Upscale millennials, according to a 15 April Nielsen study, represent the future of economic growth and prosperity. These millennials, defined by Nielsen as consumers born between 1977 and 1995, are also active technology users and own smartphones and tablets. Companies, conclude analysts, have no option but to ensure that their technology systems are geared to enhance the customer experience of millennials since users in countries like India and China alone have over two billion active mobile phones
