Customers.com Technologies

How Is Customer Service Technology Changing?

How Did Customer Service Technology Fare in 2012?

With this 4Q2012 Customer Service Update Report, we complete our ninth year of quarterly updates on the suppliers and products in customer service. Yes, we’ve been writing these reports since 2004, focusing on factors that are important in the evaluation, comparison, and selection of customer service products: customers, products, and company activity, staffing, and financial performance.

This quarter the suppliers and products are:

- Aptean Knova
- Attensity Analyze and Attensity Respond
- eGain Service
- IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA)
- KANA Enterprise, KANA Experience Analytics
- Moxie Spaces
- Next IT ActiveAgent
- Nuance/VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent
- Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service
- Salesforce.com Service Cloud, Knowledge, Marketing Cloud (Radian6)

Briefly, customer service came back strong in 4Q2012 to post a very good quarter driven by customer growth. We’re relieved and encouraged. Fourth quarters are typically good quarters for software suppliers, as their customers complete strategic projects and spend down expiring budgets. But, at the end of 2011, we were concerned. There had been a string of six consecutive mixed quarters, and it raised concerns about the state and the future of customer service software. One quarter certainly does not make a trend, but we’re encouraged. The suppliers we track have introduced or will soon introduce strong new products and major new product versions that will help their customers deliver better customer service.

VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent

Today, virtual assisted-service offerings focus on the service. VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent is a good example. Its virtual agents are cross-channel virtual agents that deploy on web, mobile, and social channels and can answer questions that help customers complete activities across all phases of the lifecycles of their relationships with businesses. VirtuOz’ Virtual Agents best capability is the range of virtual agent interaction styles. Yes, these Intelligent Virtual Agents can deliver direct answers of text, links, and images to customers’ questions. But virtual agents can also “converse” with customers to guide them to web pages that contain more complex answers or to have a question and answer dialog that leads customers to answers based on how they answer the virtual agent’s question. And virtual agents can perform tasks with case management and CRM systems on customers’ behalves, acting as customer proxies.

By the way, speaking virtual agents are coming back. Think of Siri. Their best fit is on mobile devices for customer service apps that are narrow in scope. For example, “What’s the status of my order?”

We’ll be publishing more evaluations of virtual assisted-service products in the next several months. Next up is our review of Creative Virtual V-Person. Stay tuned.

~ Mitch

VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent
Powerful and Flexible Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Virtual Assisted-Service
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, July 26, 2012

Read a short sample and share your comments!

Download the full report in PDF. (Requires login)

NETTING IT OUT

VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) is the virtual assisted-service product from VirtuOz, Inc., a privately held, venture capital funded, 10-year-old supplier based in Emeryville, CA, and Paris, France.

Organizations purchase subscription licenses of the VirtuOz IVA for cloud deployment. To date, VirtuOz claims that approximately 25 customer organizations have licensed its virtual assisted-service product.

VirtuOz earns very good grades on our Virtual Assisted-Service Report Card for Virtual Assisted-service—exceeds-requirements grades in all virtual agent technologies (answers, question analysis and matching, and customer service integration) and meets-requirements grades for analytic functionality, product viability, and supplier viability.

VirtuOz IVA is an attractive and useful offering with powerful and flexible capabilities. Use it to deploy virtual agents on web, mobile, and social channels to answer customers’ questions with direct answers, through guided dialogs, or by performing tasks on customers’ behalves within case management and CRM systems.

We recommend VirtuOz for large B2B and B2C organizations in North America and Western Europe that want to add virtual assisted-service to their customer service portfolio to support web, mobile, and social channels for answering customers’ questions across the entire customer lifecycle.

Virtual Agents Are Making a Comeback: How Virtual Agent/Virtual Assisted-Service Technology Is Evolving

We first wrote about virtual agents and their capabilities to deliver what we called virtual assisted-service in 2007 when we published a product evaluation of Human Digital Assistant from H-care, a Treviso, Italy-based startup (now out of business). We felt that virtual agents delivered a useful level of customer service when customers got stuck using self-service facilities and a business wanted to help them by using facilities that were less costly than chat or the contact center. Made sense then. Makes sense now.

We were ahead of the virtual assisted-service curve, a bit ahead of our time. Only a few virtual agents were deployed five years ago. Jenn of Alaska Airlines comes to mind. But many more have been deployed over the past few quarters. Judging by the claims of the current virtual agent suppliers, we think that you could find about 200 customer support/service web sites with virtual agents offering to answer your questions, many of them “working for” the largest businesses—businesses like AT&T, P&G, Symantec, United Airlines, the U.S. Army, and Verizon.

What’s different now? Five years ago, virtual assisted-service offerings focused on virtual agents. Virtual agents used text-to-speech technology to talk to customers, first introducing themselves, then giving customers instructions for entering questions, then voicing the answers. Virtual agents were also animated. They gestured when they spoke. Very cool technology, but customers can read way faster than virtual agents (or even live agents) can speak. The speaking slowed the service. Also, many customers prefer self-service. They’d rather visit a web site than call a contact center. These folks (I’m one of them.) really don’t want to speak with any kind of agent. The are also other significant differences:

• Networks, network connections, and the devices that customers use are much faster now than in 2007. Virtual agents have become faster, too.
• Most virtual assisted-service systems run in the cloud. Businesses can deploy them more quickly at lower initial cost.
• Chat is ubiquitous today. Virtual assisted-service looks a lot like chat.

Useful Social-Service Solution: KANA Experience Analytics

Here’s our evaluation of KANA Experience Analytics, KANA’s social-service offering. The product has capabilities for monitoring, analyzing, and taking action on customer conversations on the social web and on internal channels. These four factors should drive your consideration of KANA Experience Analytics:

• Powerful analytics are KANA Experience Analytics’ strength and key differentiator. These analytics automate the categorization of social posts and internal channel messages, speeding, simplifying, and making consistent one of the most difficult tasks in social service.
  
  
• KANA Experience Analytics is tightly integrated with KANA Service Experience Management (SEM), KANA’s enterprise customer service offering. Integration with external customer service systems is not as tight.
  
  
• KANA Experience Analytics delivers high value through attractive pricing, bundled consulting services, and rich capabilities.
  
  
• KANA targets only English-speaking geographies, although KANA’s Analytics’ support English (US and UK), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
  

KANA Experience Analytics is built on technology that came to KANA in its April 2011 acquisition of Overtone as OpenMic.

In fact, acquisitions have played a major role in transforming KANA. While the firm was founded in 1999, since the middle of 2009, the firm has reinvented itself. Same name but a much different and much stronger company, a company focused on customer service.

Here’s the chronology of how Kana reinvented itself:

• Privatization by Accel-KKR. KANA’s biggest company news in 2009 was its October 27 announcement of an agreement to sell its assets and liabilities to Accel-KKR, a technology-focused private equity firm, for a cash purchase price of approximately $48.9 million. The transaction was completed on December 23. As a result, KANA’s software and services business now operate as a privately held company under the KANA brand.
  
  
• Introduction of SEM. KANA introduced KANA Service Experience Management on June 30, 2009. SEM is KANA’s enterprise customer service offering. Customer service as a process or as a “Service Experience” is what characterizes, distinguishes, and differentiates KANA SEM.
  
  
• Lagan Acquisition. On October 6, 2010, KANA announced its intention to acquire Lagan Technologies, then a privately held supplier of G2C (government to citizen) software that was founded in 1994 in Belfast, Ireland. Lagan had a customer base of nearly 200, mostly large, local government agencies, worldwide. These agencies use the product now branded KANA Lagan to serve more than 60 million citizens. The acquisition expanded KANA’s target markets to include government organizations and gave KANA a stronger presence outside the US.
  
  
• Overtone Acquisition. On April 5, 2011 KANA announced that it has completed its acquisition of Overtone, Inc., then a privately held social listening firm that was based in San Francisco, CA.
  
  
• Trinicom Acquisition. On April 24, 2012, KANA announced that it had completed the acquisition of Trinicom, a privately held, Wilp, Netherlands-based supplier of cloud-based customer service software. KANA Business Edition, the former Trinicom’s T5, provides contact center, response management, knowledge management, self-service, community, chat, virtual assistant capabilities, and campaign capabilities for small and mid-sized businesses and government organizations. Trinicom has an installed base of 250 customers, mostly in the Benelux countries. This is an excellent acquisition that delivers significant benefits to KANA, to Trinicom, and to their customers. It expands KANA’s customer service offerings to address SMB requirements with a well-proven product suite. It expands KANA’s market reach into Western Europe. And it increases KANA’s customer base and revenue base significantly.

Today, KANA has four product lines that address requirements for multi-channel customer service for businesses and government organizations of all sizes in a wide range of geographies. The firm has a customer base of 850 accounts and a staff of 400 employees. In 2011, KANA had revenues approaching $90 million. In 2012, KANA has reached a $100 million run rate. This new KANA has become a customer service leader.

Managing the Web Experience You Offer

Our resident e-marketing and merchandising guru, Sue Aldrich, offers practical advice on how to manage your web experience (which includes mobile, kiosk, or any self-service touchpoint) to achieve a better customer experience, better customer relationships, improved business results, more control over the web experience, and more consistent brand representation. Sue provides three best practices and nine guiding principles that will help you successfully implement these practices:

Her three best practices (and implementation principles):

1. Design a Personalized Experience To Engage Customers and Support Your Business
* Be your customers’ guide
* Help customers get everything they need
* Establish strategy and plans to meet business goals and customer goals

2. Provision Your Organization for Success
* Develop a skills plan
* Develop a tools strategy and plan

Delivering a Better Global Customer Service Experience

Although the subject of this week’s report, SDL BeGlobal, isn’t exactly a customer service product, it sure can help deliver a better global customer service experience. SDL BeGlobal performs automated, real-time, “pair-wise” content translation, taking content in a source language and translates it to a target language. The product supports 85 source language/target language pairs, including most, if not all, Western European, Asian, Eastern European, Middle East, and African languages.

So, if you have knowledgebase items or ecommerce product descriptions in English, SDL BeGlobal can create language-specific versions in Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Spanish, and on and on. Along with the translated content, SDL BeGlobal also generates a translation utility and quality metric called TrustScore. This valuable feature lets you calibrate TrustScore values to route low-value translations for post-translation editing and deliver high-value translations directly to your knowledgebases, completely automating the translation process.

SDL BeGlobal is a remarkably innovative application of well known and widely used translation technology. Some of the innovations are the wide range of supported languages, the TrustScore metric, cloud computing deployment, and both browser and Web Services access to translation facilities.

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

Recommendations: Avail Behavioral Merchandising

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

Our analysis of Avail Behavioral Merchandising is our third review of a recommendation solution using our Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 1. The target market for Avail Behavioral Merchandising, as for RichRelevance Recommendations and Omniture Recommendations, is ecommerce, especially retail ecommerce. As is often the case, retailers are in the lead in adopting a technology that has so much impact on the customer experience—and on their bottom lines. Recommendations not only deliver the most interesting content in general, they can deliver the most interesting content specific to this visitor in this context. And for a merchant, delivering the most interesting content means enticing customers to buy more now, rather than get frustrated or bored and leave. Avail’s clients typically see revenue increases ranging from 5 to 30 percent per visitor. Not surprisingly, Avail has had very strong growth in the ecommerce market.

Avail Behavioral Merchandising is among the more mature recommendation offerings, on the market since 2001. This maturity is apparent in its UI, which has advanced features such as preview and test capabilities. Avail Behavioral Merchandising also has some unique capabilities that open new possibilities for merchants to work together, including collaborative merchandising and syndicated merchandising. Avail Intelligence is based in Sweden and has mostly European clients, a demonstration of its multinational and multicurrency capabilities.