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)

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

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 Suppliers’ Quarterly Update

We kick off our 7th year of customer service technology coverage with our 1Q2011 Customer Service Product and Company Update. While the economy continues to have a tough ride, and other software sectors have been up and down, the market for customer service solutions has grown steadily. That growth continues. 1Q2011 was a good quarter for customer service.

Three suppliers earned our Customers.com Customer Service Stars for the 1st quarter through excellent performance across customer growth, financial performance, products, and company activity—Attensity Group, Kana, and Salesforce.com. Kana has reached a run rate of $100 million and Salesforce.com reached a run rate of over $2 billion!

Social-Service Is the Hot Trend. 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. This quarter, Astute Solutions, Attensity Group, Consona, eGain, Kana, RightNow, and Salesforce.com introduced products and product versions and/or announced jointly developed solutions that include support for social-service. From what we’ve read and heard about 2Q2011, the trend will continue.

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.

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?