Customers.com Technologies

How Good Is the Customer Service Functionality in Salesforce Winter ’13?

Knowledge Management Is Strong; Analytics Are Weak

We’ve just done an in-depth evaluation of the customer service capabilities in Salesforce Winter ’13, the latest release of the CRM suite from Salesforce.com. These capabilities include account management, case management, knowledge management, process management, internal communities, and social network management. They comprise the broadest and deepest customer service offering that we’ve seen from any single supplier.

Service Cloud is the Salesforce CRM application that provides the case management capabilities and serves as the anchor. A collection of tightly integrated, but variously packaged and priced features and additional applications provide the rest of the customer service functionality. All of the apps and features run on the Salesforce CRM platform, which provides a very large set of common, shared services, data, and tools.

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)

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.”

Why Marketers Value Content Curation Services

By Patricia Seybold

As Web site owners, we used to worry about keeping the content on our Web home page fresh. We still do. We also care about ensuring that all of the information on our Web site(s) is up-to-date, accurate, consistent and easy to navigate. Today we also care about having fresh, insightful content anywhere a prospect might stumble upon it.

Now, in addition to maintaining fresh relevant content on our web sites, we also need to tweet, post, and link several times a day.

Social Media Has Upped the Ante
Why does social media matter?

The more people link to, tweet about, and "like" the informative and/or entertaining information we provide, the higher our organic search placement will be. That means that when a hot prospect is actually looking for what we offer, they’re going to find it easily. The more people comment, blog about, or reference information that we've branded or co-branded, the more buzz we can generate. The more buzz, the more mindshare. The more mindshare, the easier it is to convert tire-kickers to buyers.

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?

Rebranding Doesn’t Change Our Positive Recommendation for then nGenKB, now Moxie Software Knowledgebase

This week, we present our evaluation of Moxie Software Knowledgebase Winter Release 2010. It’s an update to our July 2010 evaluation of the then nGenera Knowledgebase (nGen KB) 9.0, the knowledge management-based customer service offering from the nGenera Customer Interaction Management (nGenera CIM) business unit of nGenera Corporation. That evaluation was an update to our September 2009 report on nGen KB 8.3, the previous release. And we had recommended that you “seriously consider” nGen KB 9.0. We have the same recommendation for Moxie’s Knowledgebase. This still is a very good customer service offering.

 What’s new? Most significantly it’s Moxie Software and the Moxie brand. During 2010, the then nGenera Corporation was reorganized, relocated, and, on September 15, rebranded to become Moxie Software. The milestones and details of the process are in the report.

Moxie Software is positioned to capture the action and the interest in social networking and collaboration. The new “Moxie” leverages and extends the old nGenera. It leverages the knowledge management experience, expertise, technology, and products of its 10 years as nGenera and Talisma with extensions into social networking and collaboration.

Knowledgebase is a component of Customer Spaces, a suite of applications which also includes Email, Chat Reactive, Chat Proactive, Click to Call, Phone, Social Media, CoBrowse, Community, and Answer application modules. Customer Spaces is one of two components of Spaces by Moxie. Employee Spaces is the other component. Customer Spaces is a customer service offering. Employee Spaces is a collaboration offering, collaboration within an organization.

How to Keep Customers and Prospects Engaged?

By Patricia Seybold

Provide Fresh Insights and Timely, Compelling Content

We’re all trying to grab the scarce attention of our target audiences—prospects and customers. One way we do this is by providing authoritative content in and around our expertise and our brands. We all disseminate our ideas, how to’s, and insights in a variety of ways. We use social media outreach, targeted opt-in emails, online discussions, informative e-newsletters, ever-changing content on our Web sites, and we link to videos, images, and audio that people will find appealing and seductive.

Coming up with new fresh content to showcase every day or every week can be a daunting task. But the metabolism of the Web and the rhythm of social media is greedy. It’s hard to keep up—both as a consumer of information and as a disseminator of information. As a brand owner, you want to be top of mind and easy to find when the customer’s need or mood strikes. That means that you need to be on their radar.

That’s the rub. It’s virtually impossible for any organization—even a professional publishing organization, much less a normal organization that isn’t in the publishing business—to continuously create and disseminate insightful, useful and captivating content on the topics of interest to our audiences.

Best Practices in Customer Support: What’s Under the Hood?

Self-Service Trouble-Shooting and Resolution Connected to Real-Time Experts and a Proactive Community
By Patricia Seybold and Mitch Kramer

What kind of customer support infrastructure do you need if you sell complex high tech products like mobile phones to hundreds of millions of customers? You need a state-of the art customer service platform that provides self-service and assisted service trouble-shooting, diagnostics and resolution. You want customers to be guided quickly through the steps they need to diagnose and resolve issues automatically. You want each of those attempts to automatically generate a case so that if the customer isn’t successful, you have captured all the information for an expert, or a community of far-flung experts, to lend a hand.

Consona Knowledge Driven Support (KDS) is such a platform. It provides closed-loop case management and excellent knowledge management, and it’s currently being used by Verizon Wireless, Research in Motion, Canon, Sony Electronics, Canon, Avaya, VMware, QLogic, and ADP to support hundreds of millions of customers.

At the core of Consona KDS are “Resolution Flows.” Analyst Mitchell Kramer describes them this way: “Resolution Flows are conditional sequences of discrete steps that lead a customer toward the solution to a problem (or the answer to a question). If a solution can’t be found, then Resolution Flows can escalate to assisted-service by creating a case or to social-service by submitting a Post to a community and waiting for Replies.

The Next Big Thing: Content Curation

 By Patricia Seybold

Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the perfect storm of demand for a new genre of tools. Our customers are swimming in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information. Every brand owner wants to provide authoritative information on the topics our customers care about. But our own internal experts now vie with third-party experts, passionate fans, uninformed bigots, and a cacophony of noise for customers’ scarce attention. It’s not enough to provide authoritative information on our Web sites. We also need our content to turn up everywhere our customers hang out. And we can’t rely only on our own internally-generated content. Customers trust third-party sources and each other more than they do the brand owner.

In this new world of content overupply and shorter attention spans, marketers now have three goals in providing the right information at the right time to customers and prospects:

1. Be perceived as authoritative and trusted.

2. Provide high quality information and resources, including valued and trusted third-party experts’ and customers’ contributions.

3. Provide a constant stream of timely, fresh, and valuable information to all the places and channels that customers frequent.

This is a tall order! Therefore marketers now need tools and services that make it easy for them to find, filter, aggregate, and curate targeted content that will appeal to their audiences.