Customers.com Technologies

Oracle on a Customer Service Spending Spree

The biggest news in customer service in the past quarter (3Q2011) was the October 24th announcement of Oracle’s intention to purchase RightNow. In a bit less than 12 months, Oracle has acquired three customer service suppliers: ATG, InQuira, and RightNow. All three address gaps in Oracle’s product offering. Let’s take a closer look at these purchases.

Oracle acquired ATG for its ecommerce software and customer base. ATG Commerce has been the leading ecommerce system among high-end retailers for many years. The acquisition also gave Oracle some attractive customer service offerings: ATG Instant Service and ATG Knowledge. ATG InstantService is a cloud-based chat offering that ATG acquired in January 2010. ATG Knowledge is a knowledge management offering based on technology that ATG received when it bought Primus Knowledge Solutions in 2004. Of the two, ATG Instant Service is more valuable to Oracle. It can be deployed to provide chat-based escalation from self-service to assisted-service for any of Oracle’s self-service ecommerce and customer service applications. Regarding ATG Knowledge, ATG has maintained, but has not improved, its capabilities since they redeveloped it in JAVA and deployed it on the ATG Wisdom platform. (Primus was originally built on the Windows platform.) While there are still a few Primus customers, we don’t think that Oracle will be any more aggressive than ATG was with the product, perhaps simply maintaining it.

Salesforce.com's Service Cloud Winter '12 Has No Major Limitations

We last published an evaluation of Service Cloud on August 12, 2010, a report that focused on the capabilities of the Summer ’10 release. We found that a broad set of case management, knowledge management, and account management capabilities that support a wide range of customer activities; a rich and easily customizable self-service UI; the Customer Portal; and the viability of Salesforce.com (SFDC) were its key strengths. Its limitations were in search and analytic functionality. In the four releases since our evaluation, SFDC has made significant improvements in every area that we evaluate, including search and analytics. SFDC has also introduced new products that support chat (Live Agent) and customer service processes (Visual Workflow), further broadening and strengthening the offering.

In this evaluation of the customer service capabilities of the Winter ’12 release of Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud, the key strengths continue to be the breadth of capabilities and their support for customer activities, UI content management, and the viability of SFDC. Improvements have made knowledge management a key strength, too, and search and analytic functionality are no longer limitations.

Customer Service Suppliers’ Strong Performance

3Q2010 was an Excellent Quarter for Customer Service Suppliers

The first three quarters of 2010 have been very good ones for suppliers of customer service solutions. Customer service is positioned for a big finish in 4Q2010 and for another good year in 2011. The recession has taught companies that they need to continue to invest in supporting their customers well throughout the customer lifecycle: both pre-sales and post-sales. And, today’s customers value both self-service and seamless assisted service options. (Let me do it myself, and if I can’t do it quickly, connect me to someone who knows a) what I was trying to do, b) what my context is, and c) is knowledgeable about both your products and your policies and processes.

This week, we publish our recap of where each of the 11 suppliers stands as of the end of Q3 2010.

Customer growth was mixed: way up for two of our suppliers, down slightly for two others, and steady, as compared with several previous quarters for the rest. RightNow had the biggest gain in customer acquisition.

The big deals for the quarter were eGain closing a $5 million plus deal with a major telecommunications provider and IntelliResponse signing up a top ten North American bank.

Financial performance was up for the quarter, reflecting customer growth and boosted by large deals, and professional services revenue. Salesforce.com broke its quarterly revenue record again, and offered guidance that it will become a $2 billion company in its next fiscal year.

Product activity was heavy in 3Q2010. Eight of eleven suppliers announced or released new products and/or new product versions. KANA introduced KANA SEM 11, a major new version of its process-oriented customer service offering. Our evaluation will be published in the next few weeks. It’s a very strong and innovative offering.

Company activity was heavy, too. Customer Service suppliers made acquisitions and established and strengthened partnerships. nGenera CIM became Moxie Software. Most significantly, Oracle announced its intention to acquire ATG, only a quarter after we resumed coverage of ATG.

Three of four key recent trends continued: social media, assisted-service, and cloud computing. The fourth, mobile computing, was not evident in the quarter’s product or company activity.

We awarded two Customer Service Stars for 3Q2010: eGain and Moxie Software earned their first Customer Service Stars for balanced performance across customer growth, products, financial performance, and company activity.

Customer Service Company and Product Update
An Excellent 3Q2010 for Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, December 16, 2010

Updated In-Depth Review of Salesforce.com's Service Cloud

To date, Salesforce.com claims that nearly 9,000 customers have licensed Service Cloud, four million user licenses have been purchased for Customer Portal, and approximately 100 customers have licensed Salesforce Knowledge. Very few customers have licensed Answers, a community/user forum application that was introduced last February with Spring '10 release.

Support for social media got our attention. Service Cloud, of course, supports Chatter, SFDC's application for collaboration among an organization's internal users. For example, you might use Chatter to track and communicate the work to resolve a case, exchanging technical information and status among level one and level 2 CSRs, developers, QA personnel, and even the account executive. However, Service Cloud, and, in fact, all of Salesforce CRM, does not support external, public social media. SFDC has been talking about Salesforce for Twitter and a Salesforce for Facebook or a Facebook Connector for quite a while, but these are not actual products with warranties and support. Rather, they're free, downloadable apps from AppExchange that have been developed by SFDC personnel outside formal product development. SFDC told us that these are "managed." That is, they are built to accommodate and support upgrades and they cannot be modified by the organization that downloads them. To be sure, they are useful apps, and we gather that a few thousand organizations have downloaded and deployed them. Take care in using them.

Our report on Service Cloud Summer '10 updates our report on the Winter '10 release of Salesforce.com's customer service. We had described Winter '10 as a "release 1" offering with basic knowledge management capabilities, limited search, basic escalation facilities, and virtually absent analytic functionality. In Spring '10 and Summer '10, Salesforce.com has made many significant improvements to Service Cloud. Analytic functionality in Service Cloud 2 Summer '10 has been improved significantly. Certainly it's no longer a release 1 offering.

Service Cloud and its Answers, Customer Portal, Entitlements, Salesforce Knowledge, and Salesforce Mobile add-ons provide a very broad range of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle case management, knowledge management, and social media customer service capabilities. These applications are positioned to address the requirements of high volume B2C contact centers that provide support for complex products as well as B2B contact centers. Within this positioning, Service Cloud's case management capabilities and Salesforce Knowledge KM capabilities support assisted-service and, through the Customer Portal and Force.com-based public Web sites, support self-service. In addition, Service Cloud's Answers application supports a level of peer-service or social service.

We've performed this evaluation of Service Cloud Summer '10 using our new, more general, customer service framework rather than the framework for evaluating knowledge management-based customer service offerings, the framework we used to evaluate Service Cloud Winter '10. The new framework places less emphasis on knowledge management and search technologies and places more emphasis on the channels and customer activities supported. Service Cloud is much more than a KM-based customer service offering. Its strengths are in case management and customer activity support. As a result, it earned better grades both because of its improvements and because of the changes in our evaluation criteria. Most of the new and enhanced capabilities in Spring '10 and in Summer '10 have not been made in knowledge management or search technologies. Salesforce.com still has work to do in those areas.

Bottom line, Service Cloud 2 Summer '10 has no major limitations, no showstoppers. We recommend that you consider it for your organization's case management, knowledge management, and account management requirements. If your organization's customer service experience is built on your contact center, then Service Cloud 2 could very well be your best fit.

Salesforce Service Cloud Summer '10
Significantly Improved Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, August 5, 2010

Customer Interaction Cloud from Cisco and Salesforce

On October 5, Cisco and Salesforce.com jointly announced Customer Interaction Cloud, a combined Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) "solution" that enables customer service organizations to implement their contact centers entirely "in the cloud." An organization can deploy its entire contact center in the cloud on Force.com, Salesforce.com's cloud computing platform. This includes case management and knowledge management customer service applications, call routing, call queuing, agent management, and CTI telephony applications, and the integrations between them are deployed entirely.

This is a very big, maybe market-changing announcement.

Think about it. Cisco and salesforce.com are providing an approach to contact center implementation that requires no computer system hardware or software and no telephony hardware or software—no hw/sw purchase, implementation, or management and support. A little provisioning and configuration, perhaps a little customization and, whammo, you've got a fully functional contact center. Train your CSRs, give them the URL to access the apps' home page through the Web browsers on their desktops and their IP phones, and turn them loose. (Yes, Customer Interaction Cloud assumes you're using VoIP.)

We cover several customer service suppliers with offerings that have SaaS deployments—Astute Solutions, Attensity Group, IntelliResponse, nGenera, and RightNow in addition to Salesforce.com. In addition, we know of several telephony suppliers that have CaaS (Communications as a Service) deployments of their applications—Mobivox, OnState, SipGate, and Voxeo, for example. But, we believe that Cisco is the first telephony supplier to offer SaaS deployment and, together, Cisco and Salesforce.com are the first to offer a complete and integrated SaaS contact center offering that combines customer service and telephony applications.