Customers.com Technologies

Oracle to Acquire ATG

Big news in ecommerce last week. On November 2, Oracle announced its intention to acquire ATG. This is a $1 billion acquisition that will close during 1Q2011 when Oracle buys all of ATG’s stock at $6.00 per share. $1 billion is about five times ATG’s current revenue. The $6.00 price per share is almost a 50 percent premium over recent share prices.

The companies describe the rationale for the acquisition as their approach to addressing the requirement for cross-channel commerce, a requirement driven by a convergence of online and traditional commerce. That approach is a unified CRM, retail and commerce platform. Oracle has the CRM and retail systems. ATG brings the commerce, commerce that includes merchandising and customer service as well as the traditional catalog, shopping cart, transaction processing, and account management.

The rationale makes sense. There is absolutely a cross-channel commerce requirement. Ecommerce suppliers had begun to address in the past two or three years with merchandising, shopping carts, and transaction support on mobile channels, social channels. They’ve also begun to support the contact center channel with offerings that put the standard ecommerce applications on agents desktops with added capabilities for order management, returns and refunds, and account management. ATG Commerce already supported mobile and social channels. ATG Commerce Service Center, an add-on feature, provided contact center support. (We evaluated it in March 2008.) However, ATG Commerce does not provide the marketing, sales, customer service, and account management capabilities of CRM systems. It also does not have the order management and distribution capabilities of retail systems. That’s the stuff that Oracle brings to the deal. In time, a unified, cross-channel commerce, CRM, and retail platform could result.

Our Customer Service Suppliers' Quarterly Update

Customer service is a great research beat. It never goes out of style. Customers are never going to run out of questions and problems. Delivering answers and solutions will always be the key to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability—for companies of all sizes, in every industry, in every geography. I’m staying with it.

Across my five years of research in this practice area, customer service has changed and evolved, delivering answers and solutions across more phases of the customer lifecycle, using new channels, and leveraging new and improved technologies. I’ve changed, too. You may remember Web self-service, cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service, and KM-based customer service. This specialization was important at the time because all of us had such a narrow view of customer service—using the contact center to deliver answers to questions and solutions to problems that customers have in installing and using your products and services. I felt that I had to get your attention by giving customer service names that connoted something about channels and/or technologies.

No longer.

Now, we call it “customer service” and it encompasses all channels, all phases of the customer lifecycle, and all customer service technologies. In my research, I want to help companies deliver customer service at the right time, on the right channel, using the right technologies to answer questions and solve problems.

With this week’s 1Q2010 Customer Service Company and Product update, I’ve begun my sixth year of quarterly reports on customer service. In our 1Q2010 Customer Service Company and Product Update, I continued to see four key trends in customer service: social media, assisted-service, mobile computing, and cloud computing. Think of these trends as new tactics in the customer lifecycle, as new channels, as new and improving technologies for delivering answers and solutions.

In a nutshell, 1Q2010 was a steady quarter for customer service. Customer growth was about the same in 1Q2010 as it was in the very good 4Q2009. And it was the same for financial performance (because customer growth is the key driver for financial performance). Overall, product activity was light, but Attensity Group, nGenera CIM, and RightNow made significant product announcements. Overall, company activity was light, too, but Attensity Group launched a subsidiary to serve the federal market, RightNow introduced an innovative new product subscription agreement, and Salesforce.com formed a partnership with VMware to deliver Java development and a Java infrastructure to its cloud computing platform.

Customer Service Company and Product Update, 1Q2010
A Steady 1Q2010 for Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, June 17, 2010

Two Hot Trends in Customer Service Technology

By Mitchell I. Kramer
Sr. VP & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

What are the two hottest trends in customer service solutions? 

1. The ability to integrate social networking conversations into your self-service and assisted-service knowledge bases and case management

2. The ability to integrate assisted-service with contact center technologies

Here is our 3Q2009 Customer Service Product and Company update. Yes, it’s a little late, but two of the ten suppliers we track, IntelliResponse and Salesforce.com, end their quarter a month later than calendar quarters.

3Q2009 was another good quarter in KM-based customer service, the second quarter in a row, even though third quarters are typically seasonally soft for all IT suppliers. All of our vendors showed improvement in at least one of the three areas that we track—customers, products, and company. Four of them improved across all three and earned Customer Service Stars (alphabetically): Consona CRM, IntelliResponse, RightNow, and Salesforce.com. This is the first Customer Service Star for Consona CRM. Its acquisition of SupportSoft, KCS v4 verification, and new versions of its case management and knowledge management offerings position it well for continued success.

The two hot trends are integration of social media and integration of contact center-based assisted-service. Customer service is increasingly cross-channel. Facebook and Twitter have become important interaction channels as customers use them to communicate with their suppliers and with each other to seek answers and solutions. Facebook Fanpages are a knowledge source for customer service. Make sure that you’re on the social Web both for visibility and customer sat. Your customers live there. That’s where they expect to find the right answers and solutions.

Integration with assisted-service is a back-to-the-future trend. It was also a hot one five or six years ago. KM suppliers are, again, integrating their offerings with contact center/case management systems. For example, InQuira iConnect for Siebel Contact Center puts InQuira’s KM capabilities on the Siebel (now Oracle) agent desktop, or Salesforce Knowledge puts new KM capabilities on the Salesforce.com agent desktop. Why is this integration hot again? After all, customer service has always been cross-channel. Well, we think that organizations have been over-focusing on customer self-service. Self-service is a great strategy in tough economic times. But customers still need help, help on the telephone and, now more than last time, help via Web chat.

One more thing. There were a ton of new products announced late in 3Q and early in 4Q. We’ll be quite busy evaluating them in the next few months. Our evaluation of Salesforce.com Service Cloud 2 is just about ready.

Integrated Customer Service Knowledge Management Needs to Span Self-Service, Assisted Service, Case Management, and Contact Center Solutions

The Web and the contact center are the two critical channels for cross-channel customer service—the Web for self-service and the contact center for assisted-service. Customer portals are the mechanism for delivering self-service on the Web. Agent desktops are the mechanism for delivering assisted-service through the contact center.

Knowledge management-based customer service offerings can be the key to delivering customer service across both these channels. For Web self-service, they typically offer portal-like UIs. For contact center-based assisted-service, their integration with the case/incident capabilities of the agent desktops in contact center offerings can be the key to helping agents/CSRs deliver more effective, more efficient, and more consistent customer service. InQuira iConnect provides that integration between its InQuira 8 knowledge management offering and leading contact center products.