Customers.com Technologies

How Does RightNow Social Experience Stack Up?

This week’s report is our evaluation of RightNow Social Experience, the social-service component of RightNow CX, RightNow’s—or, should we say, Oracle | RightNow’s—customer service suite. The report is also our first social-service evaluation in our new series. As usual, we perform and document the evaluation against a framework of evaluation criteria. We’ll use the same framework for all of our social-service research, allowing easy, apples-to-apples comparisons and fast and easy product selections. Briefly, here’s what the framework looks like:

Customer service best fit

• Positioning and target markets 
• Deployment
• Environments
• Packaging
• Pricing
• Customer base
• Alternatives (competition)

Our Latest Quarterly Report on Customer Service Suppliers

By Ronni Marshak

We continue our seventh year of quarterly updates on the suppliers and products in customer service. These updates focus on factors that are important in the evaluation, comparison, and selection of customer service products. The 10 suppliers/product lines that we have been covering are:

• Astute Solutions ePowerCenter and RealDialog

• Attensity Group E-Service, Voice of Customer Suite, Social Media Suite

• Consona Corporation Knova

• eGain Service

• InQuira 8 (now Oracle Knowledge Management)

• IntelliResponse Answer Suite

• KANA 10 Service Experience Management, Overtone

• Moxie Software Customer Spaces Knowledgebase (formerly nGenera CIM nGen KB)

• RightNow CX (just acquired by Oracle)

• Salesforce.com Service Cloud
  

Read the latest on each company’s performance, products, and company activity. Next week, we’ll bring you a timely and detailed product review on RightNow CX Social Experience so you can better understand the customer service portfolio that Oracle is assembling.

Customer Service Supplier and Product Update
3Q2011 Was a Quiet Quarter for Customer Service
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, December 8, 2011

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.

Knova 8: State of the Art Customer Service

By Mitch Kramer

This report is our evaluation of Knova 8.0. It’s a major new version of the knowledge management-based customer service offering from Consona Corporation. The name might sound familiar. Consona has gone back to the future to rename the product. Knova was the name of the company and the knowledge management product that Consona acquired in 2007. While Consona changed the name to Consona Knowledge Management in October 2008, customers have continued to call the product Knova. So Knova it is—again.

Knova v8.0 is the first “Consona” release. Consona CRM’s R&D organization has made significant investments to improve the quality, stability and performance of this software. In fact, in the Release Notes document for Knova 8.0, Consona states, “Consona Knowledge Management 8.0 emphasizes quality, stability, and performance over expanding functionality.”

Customer Service Suppliers' Update - 2Q2011

We release our latest quarterly update on 10 major suppliers and products in customer service:

• Astute Solutions ePowerCenter and RealDialog
• Attensity Group E-Service, Voice of Customer Suite, Social Media Suite
• Consona Corporation Knowledge Driven Support and Knowledge Management
• eGain Service
• InQuira 8
• IntelliResponse Answer Suite
• KANA 10 Service Experience Management
• Moxie Software Customer Spaces Knowledgebase (formerly nGenera CIM nGen KB)
• RightNow CX
• Salesforce.com Service Cloud

We’ve been providing these quarterly updates for seven years!

Social-service is the hottest trend in customer service. We call it social-service because it's about customers using social networks to get answers to their questions and solutions to their problems by monitoring and searching social media. The term social-service fits naturally with the terms self-service and assisted-service to categorize the channels that customers use to get answers and solutions. In 2Q11, Attensity Group, IntelliResponse, and RightNow introduced products and product versions and/or announced jointly developed solutions or partnerships that included support for social-service.

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?

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