Working with RightNow, Shaklee has improved the productivity of the 120 agents in its Customer Service operations. To service Shaklee members and distributors, agents need access to five different systems. Prior to RightNow, agents toggled between the systems which was very time-consuming. The RightNow solution enabled Shaklee to easily integrate its legacy systems into the agent desktop and add a series of custom tabs for all web-enabled applications that agents use, including UPS, RMA, and a link to Shaklee’s member center. Because they now have access to everything they need on a single agent desktop, Shaklee customer service agents work more efficiently and training new agents is also quicker. Peter Neels, Shaklee’s vice president of customer service, estimates that these custom tabs save a minute to a minute and a half on order entry calls. “One of the biggest benefits of RightNow is the ability for our agents to see everything in one place. That has allowed us to cut training time,” adds Neels.
The RightNow system also helps Shaklee manage approximately 70,000 to 80,000 phone calls each month, depending on the season. Based on the nature of the question, topic-based routing directs callers to subject-matter specialists. Email management enables Shaklee to track and respond to between 7,000 and 10,000 emails each month, and to meet a goal of responding within 24 hours. As an added benefit, RightNow has assisted Shaklee in eliminating the phenomenon so common in contact centers where callers ask different staffers the same question until they get the answer they want. Now, Shaklee can also utilize RightNow to send a follow up email to the caller to recap the conversation and provide a written copy of the answer they were given. “This is a huge value add,” says Neels.
The integration between RightNow and Shaklee’s legacy systems has had added efficiencies for other processes as well. Two years ago, Shaklee changed vendors for their order entry system and had to migrate agents from the old vendor to the new one. Neels attributes the transition’s success to their RightNow solution where order entry is a tab in the agent desktop. Without that in place, Neels estimates the transition would have taken twice as long and the associated agent training would have been time-consuming and costly.
Shaklee also utilizes the RightNow knowledge base which is populated with more than 700 answers for web self-service. The single knowledge base offers one level of information to customers while a deeper level of information is available to Shaklee agents.

RightNow Marketing empowers Shaklee to set up campaigns in a matter of hours—not days—and Neels, who brought RightNow to Shaklee six years ago, estimates that the RightNow Marketing saves a full headcount. Recently, Shaklee has begun utilization of RightNow Custom Business Objects to integrate contacts and member information to personalize their marketing campaigns. Shaklee also uses custom objects to generate an automatic welcome letter based on the member’s rank, country, product purchased, and language spoken to ensure each member receives the correct mailing. “The benefit of RightNow Marketing is in the flexibility of the system,” explains Neels. “Once the data is there, the system is very easy to use.”
“With custom business objects, we are able to push data into the RightNow system and send targeted mailings based on whether a product was purchased or not and cross-sales mailings if a member bought one product but not another product,” adds Leigh Bordelon, Shaklee’s field training specialist. “Other departments at Shaklee now want to use RightNow for different types of mailings, departments that were looking at buying their own marketing tool until we said, ‘Hey, we can do that.’”

Shaklee provides business leaders the system to create effective messaging and marketing campaigns. To accomplish this most efficiently, Shaklee utilizes RightNow Marketing to send mailings that look and feel as though the mailings are coming from the individual distributors. This helps distributors communicate with their members and enables Shaklee to deliver key educational messages.
Shaklee also sends an automated, personalized message to every member on his or her birthday. Shaklee also uses the system to announce meetings to a specific segment of members. “Before RightNow, we had to pull the list together then send an email from Outlook then remember to send a reminder message,” says Bordelon. “With the recurrence feature in RightNow, we can set up a single broadcast mailing complete with the reminders and just forget about it until we come back to check in and see how it did. The added efficiency is amazing.”
The RightNow system also automatically checks whether a member has received a mailing in the last twenty-four hours before sending another message. If they have, the system doesn’t email them again. “Our campaigns are more detailed and focused,” adds Bordelon. “We are able to see how people are reacting with click-throughs and we’ve successfully sold the marketing module to other departments who were looking to buy a different solution.”

Shaklee measures campaign effectiveness by tracking delivery rates, abandonment rates, and click-throughs with the analytics solution. Using a custom business object, Shaklee imports data from other systems into RightNow so that call drivers, trending, and other important metrics can be reported in real-time to Shaklee directors. One-off report requests are also easy to run. “RightNow is providing a robust reporting capability that we’ve never had before,” says Neels.
With a customized marketing tab in the agent desktop, Shaklee agents also have immediate access to see which mailings a member has received and whether they clicked through.
Going forward, Shaklee is looking to utilize RightNow to send confirmation emails which are currently done through the company’s legacy system. With RightNow, Shaklee can create branded emails, making the communication more professional.

Since its formation in 1956, Shaklee has been a leading provider of premium quality, natural, environmentally friendly nutrition, personal care, and household products. The Shaklee brand is synonymous with high quality and efficacy, representing one of the most well established names in the nutritional supplement and direct selling industries.