Customers.com Technologies

Recommendations: Baynote Collective Intelligence Platform

By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Baynote is the fourth in our series of recommendation solution evaluations using our Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1. The first three solutions we reviewed, Avail Behavioral Merchandising, RichRelevance, and Omniture Recommendations, have an ecommerce focus, especially retail ecommerce. Baynote is tackling a much broader market, targeting telecommunications, media, and manufacturing, and also digging into applications such as search and navigation, customer service, customer support, intranets and extranets.

In the customer experience realm, retailers tend to be in the lead in technology, and recommendations are no exception. So it’s no surprise that people think of recommendations as a commerce function: “other people like you who looked at this, ultimately bought that.” But recommendations have the potential to provide the core technology for simple personalization. Simple, at least, for the Web teams in charge of implementing and the marketers in charge of managing. So Baynote’s broader focus certainly makes sense in terms of market needs, and the company’s success with retailers indicates that their technology and services are definitely competitive.

nGenera Knowledgebase Incorporates Social Media, Wikis, and New Analytics

nGen KB 9.0 Gets Top Grades

Our report this week is our evaluation of nGenera Knowledgebase (nGen KB) 9.0, the new version of the knowledge management-based customer service offering from the nGenera Customer Interaction Management (nGenera CIM) business unit of nGenera Corporation. The evaluation is an update to our September 24, 2009 report on nGen KB 8.3, the previous release.

nGen KB has a customer base of approximately 600 accounts and a product history that dates back to 2003. nGenera CIM offers two deployment options for nGen KB: on-premise and “on-demand” (single tenant and multi tenant hosted). Note that your nGen KB deployment requires Microsoft technologies—Windows, IIS, and SQL Server.

nGen KB is a component of the nGen CIM Suite which also includes nGen Chat, nGen Email, nGen Answer, nGen Click to Call, nGen Phone, nGen CoBrowse, and, new in 9.0, nGen Community and nGen Social Media.

9.0 is a major new version, major in its numerical designation but, more significantly, major in its new and improved capabilities. Key are:

• Social media support—social media as knowledge sources and interaction channels and analysis of social media content
• New knowledge sources and search sources including Wiki and external databases
• New self-service UI
• RSS support for subscriptions to and notifications of Knowledgebase changes
• New analyses of social media and new packaged reports on those social media analyses

On the Customers.com report card for customer service, nGen KB 8.3 had earned good grades. Analytic functionality was the only area where some improvement was needed. In nGen 9.0, nGenera CIM has addressed the issues with analytic functionality very well. Our only issues are in supporting mobile devices and in supporting Facebook as a knowledge source and interaction channel. nGenera CIM told us that both would be addressed in future releases. To be fair, 9.0 is the product’s initial social media release. On the other hand, supporting mobile devices is a more urgent requirement.

We had recommended that you “seriously consider” nGen KB 8.3; we strengthen that recommendation for nGen KB 9.0. This is a very good customer service offering.

nGenera Knowledgebase 9.0
Excellent Knowledge Management, UI Content Management, and Analytics
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, July 1, 2010