Case Studies

BEA Case Study

InQuira POWERS BEA SYSTEMS' "AskBEA" CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE WEB SITE

"We believe that AskBEA delivers one of the most powerful, web-based customer self-service systems of its kind today. With InQuira’s customer search and navigation application we are able to offer our customers highly accurate self-service for a fraction of the cost - and none of the maintenance - of a custom-built system."
Terry Barrett - Vice President, Worldwide Customer Support, BEA Systems

BEA Systems, Inc. is the world's leading application infrastructure software company, providing the enterprise software foundation for 13,000 customers around the world, including the majority of the Fortune Global 500. BEA and its WebLogic® brand are among the most trusted names in business. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., BEA has 91 offices in 33 countries and is on the Web at www.bea.com.

BEA wanted to provide its growing customer base with access to content from several different sources, including product documentation, white papers, a Clarify knowledge base, general web site information, and even newsgroups. In addition, they were supporting 33 product/version combinations and had created over 10,000 different documents through multiple content management systems.

"We had a critical problem to solve," recounts Terry Barrett, Vice President, Worldwide Customer Support. "We were experiencing tremendous growth in our core business, and our customer support case volume was increasing faster than our ability to staff up with expertly trained representatives. As a result, our customers were getting frustrated and we were watching our customer service costs skyrocket."

In July 2001, BEA Systems implemented InQuira's customer search and navigation application for self-service, an innovative software solution that tightly integrates natural language processing used in Self-Service applications with information retrieval technology used in Enterprise Search applications.

Once installed, InQuira's application automatically indexed all of BEA's customer support information and made it available through the AskBEA web site, BEA’s online service application. Using a natural language interface, BEA customers were then able to ask questions in their own words and receive accurate, precise answers. With InQuira, AskBEA gained a three-fold increase in usage in just six months. Also, AskBEA is easily scalable, so BEA can keep up with future growth.

"With InQuira, we were able to deploy highly accurate self-service on the AskBEA site for a fraction of the cost - and none of the maintenance - of a custom-built system," said Barrett.

Since deploying InQuira's solution, BEA has realized a number of key benefits:

  • Improved customer satisfaction: as a result of implementing the InQuira solution, BEA has provided their customers with a powerful and instantaneous alternative to their call centers, contributing to an increase in customer satisfaction from a 3.7 to 4.2.
  • Decreased call center support reliance and costs: BEA customers rapidly adopted the AskBEA application and the web site experienced a three-fold increase in usage in a period of six months. BEA today estimates 35% of total customer support inquiries are being handled via self help on the Web.
  • Scalable customer service: with InQuira, BEA is able to scale their customer support function to keep pace with their high-growth business. The InQuira solution has enabled BEA Systems to maximize customer satisfaction while minimizing total customer service costs. The system allowed BEA to handle more cases while reducing total customer support costs.
  • Improved support engineer productivity: powered by InQuira, the AskBEA site deflects a significant amount of calls that would otherwise be handled by BEA support engineers. Customers are empowered to answer their own questions whenever possible, allowing engineers to focus on more complicated customer needs where high-touch service is essential.
  • Increased sales and realized cost savings: leveraging InQuira, BEA has saved over $2-3 million in the first year of deployment.

See InQuira in action on http://support.bea.com