Musicnotes.com knows the importance of keeping on the same page. The firm is an Internet-based sheet music store, offering over 100,000 pieces of digital sheet music and guitar tablature; it also sells books.

 

And that playing and singing from the same sheets includes with its customers. This is possible through multichannel customer care performed by Musicnotes’ contact center staff on hosted customer interaction management (CIM) instruments being provided by nGenera.

 

Musicnotes recently sold its five-millionth download since the site launched in 1999 and its current growth rate remains strong at 20 percent year-over-year.

 

And this service-driven success led Musicnotes to land on Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 Best Retail Websites 2009.

 

“We feel that our service quality has played an important role in our success by generating additional purchases from existing customers,” says Kristin Gilbertson, Musicnotes’ Director, Customer Service. “In the first quarter, 65 percent of sales were attributed to returning customers and this number is consistent from quarter to quarter.”

 

The service quality-driven success has come from an initiative by Musicnotes to make its service more accessible and helpful to customers by giving them a convenient and user-friendly way for them to obtain immediate answers to their questions and concerns, without adding personnel. The Internet firm has five contact center agents in its Madison, Wis. office. It also wanted to offer chat, which it says its younger customers have a growing preference for, in addition to phone and e-mail contacts. 

 

After much research, Musicnotes selected nGenera CIM, specifically its nGen Knowledgebase and nChat modules, delivered via hosting. The nGen Knowledgebase is accessible to both agents and customers. The firm specified hosted delivery to avoid investing in additional hardware. 

 

Musicnotes installed the solutions in December 2007 in only a few days. The firm found the setup easy and intuitive. The chat templates provided were simple to customize. nGenera CIM offers free training which its found extremely helpful. This coupled with the tools’ ease of use enabled its customer service team to swiftly come up to speed on the new technology and channel.

 

“There are many companies who offer these services, however, we chose nGenera CIM because it offered the best value,” explains Gilbertson. “They are very cost-effective and were within our budget. Their software is scalable so that it will accommodate our needs as we grow. We also appreciated the 30 day trial offer and free training.”

 

The nGenera CIM applications have proven very successful. Gilbertson estimates that the knowledgebase and chat tools enabled her firm to increase the productivity twofold with existing staff levels. Customers are getting immediate answers to their questions via the online knowledgebase: which decreases the amount of direct inquiries it receives.

 

There have been a few challenges with the hosted CIM solutions. There were instances when Musicnotes’ knowledgebase was not accessible because of server issues on nGenera CIM’s end. These were quickly addressed upon contacting them. Musicnotes encountered a few bugs with chat including the spell check not working and lack of compatibility with Firefox 3.0, which were eventually resolved. 

 

“We have been very pleased with the nGenera CIM solutions,” says Gilbertson. “Our customers appreciate the option to communicate with us via chat; we’ve seen a steady increase in chat usage since deployment. Another real plus is that our agents really like the tools so it has been simple to get everyone using them.”

 

Musicnotes is looking at making greater use of the nGen CIM tools. It would like to expand its contact center service hours for greater accessibility. It also wants to deploy the Solution Finder option in the nGen CIM Knowledgebase to help customers through the software installation and to easily find answers to simple technical issues such as ‘why my music won’t print’. 

 

“We feel doing this will help our customers get the answers they need to simple questions even faster and enable our agents to assist customers with more complex questions,” says Gilbertson.

 

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