Customers.com Technologies

Third Quarter Update on Customer Service Suppliers

Social-Service continues as the hottest trend in customer service. Integration is on the rise, helping businesses create richer customer service experiences by linking applications from different suppliers faster, easier, and less costly. In 3Q2012, Moxie and VirtuOz announced an integration partnership that enables seamless escalation from virtual agents deployed on VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent to web chat using Moxie’s Chat Spaces.

1. This illustration shows the integration between VirtuOz IVA and Chat Spaces for Windstream. When the customer clicks the "Yes, please transfer me to a Live Chat agent" link in Wendy's response, the escalation is triggered. © 2012 Windstream Corp.

Speaking of virtual agents, our research on virtual assisted-service has continued in 3Q2012 (and into 4Q2012). We’ve published evaluations of VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent on July 26, of Creative Virtual V-Person on September 12, and of NextIT ActiveAgent on November 29. We plan to begin work on IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA) very soon, completing a set of evaluations on the leading products. We really think that businesses should seriously consider adding a virtual assisted-service application to their customer service portfolios. These applications use various and typically patented approaches to natural language processing (NLP) technology to deliver a single answer, usually the right answer, to customers’ questions. They’re lower in cost to service as compared to live agent-based assisted-service. They can be more effective and more efficient than traditional web self-service that uses conventional search.

Customer Service Suppliers Poised for Growth in 2012?

Each quarter we review the state of the customer service industry by providing updates on the nine top suppliers (after industry consolidation): Astute, Attensity, Consona, eGain, IntelliResponse, Kana, Moxie, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.

The first quarter of 2012 was not a good quarter in customer service. After a big 1Q2011, 2011 faded through the next three quarters as customer growth and financial performance were mixed, and product and company activity were relatively light. The fade has continued into 1Q2012.

But no fading for Salesforce.com. SFDC had another huge quarter, continuing its string of consecutive quarters, the latest better than the previous. IntelliResponse had some large deals and shifted from educational institutions to more commercial accounts.

The surprise in Q1 was Oracle RightNow. After Oracle’s acquisition of RightNow closed on January 25, Oracle RightNow began operating as a Global Business Unit, hiring aggressively and introducing regular, quarterly product releases. When Oracle announced its intent to acquire RightNow on October 24, 2011, we felt and we wrote that, post-acquisition, RightNow could quickly lose its identity and its brand and its product could disappear within Oracle’s very large software portfolio. Not the case. No losers in this acquisition. The new Oracle RightNow is bigger and is growing faster than the old RightNow.

Salesforce.com launched a new entry-level customer service offering called Desk.com, which is based on the technology that it obtained in its September 12, 2011 acquisition of Assistly. The firm also launched Salesforce Rypple, its first HCM/HR application that adds social networking to performance management. The product is based on the technology that came to Salesforce.com in its December 15, 2011 acquisition of Rypple.

In fact, Salesforce.com and Oracle make us optimistic for the remainder of 2012. All of the other suppliers have new and refreshed offerings that can help organizations address requirements, especially for social-service and for customer service processes. It’s an election year in the U.S. The economy, certainly the corporate world, appears to be growing. Corporate growth means more customers, and more customers means more customer service.

Here's my quarterly Customer Service Supplier and Product Update for 1Q2012.

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?

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.