Customer Service Supplier and Product Update Report

This week’s report concludes our sixth year of publishing Quarterly Customer Service Updates. It’s been a great ride for us, for our suppliers, for their customers, and, we’re pretty sure, for their customers—the folks that call the contact centers, access the self-service Web sites, and participate in communities and social network to get answers to questions and solutions to problems.

We’ve taken a different approach to our 4Q2010 report. As usual, we examined the quarter’s customer growth, financial performance, product activity, and company activity for each of our eleven suppliers. We also awarded Customers.com Customer Service Stars—suppliers that demonstrate excellent, balanced, and improved performance across these dimensions for the quarter. Attensity Group, Moxie Software, and Salesforce.com earned Stars for 4Q2010.

What’s new and different is that we examined performance across the four dimensions for all of 2010, looking for excellence, balance, and improvement for the year. We have the data. Why not use it?

Attensity Group and Salesforce.com earned, quite deservingly, Customers.com Customer Service Stars for 2010. For example, in 2010, Attensity Group acquired 74 percent more new customers, and did business with 80 percent more existing customers than in 2009. Salesforce.com acquired almost 2500 new customer service customers. (Yes, Salesforce.com operates on a different scale than Attensity Group. In fact, it operates on a different scale than any other customer service suppliers, but we’re looking for relative improvements, not absolute numbers.) In company activity, Attensity Group formed three technology partnerships, formed one reseller partnerships, made a technology acquisition, and formed a subsidiary to sell to the federal government. Salesforce.com made three technology acquisitions and formed three technology partnerships. Performance for 2010 was also excellent for Attensity Group and for Salesforce.com in financial performance and product activity. Read the report for the complete record.

2011 is already looking like another excellent year in customer service. Already in 1Q2011:

• Attensity Group formed a technology partnership with Coventry, UK-based Rapide Communications, Ltd. to jointly develop a cloud-based loyalty solution and announced Attensity Respond 5.0, a new version of its customer response management application. The key new capability of 5.0 is support for Twitter, a high value feature that delivers response management to social channels.
  
  
• InQuira announced a technology and reseller partnership with SAP. InQuira (cross channel knowledge management and search) Platform became an SAP-endorsed business solution.
  
  
• KANA signed a major deal with the city of Brisbane, Queensland, AU for its new G2C platform.
  
  
• RightNow acquisition of Q-go, an Amsterdam, NL-based search supplier. Q-go.com technologies and products have already become RightNow CX Intent Guide and RightNow Natural Language Search. Q-go’s technology enhances search in RightNow CX significantly.

We’re really looking forward to our 1Q2011 Customer Service Update report and to beginning our seventh year customer service coverage.

Here's our 4Q2010 report:

Customer Service Supplier and Product Update
A Good 4Q2010 and an Excellent 2010 for Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 10, 2011