Customers.com Technologies

Quick Take on Oracle Service Cloud Virtual Assistant

By Mitch Kramer

We just concluded our in-depth evaluation of Oracle Service Cloud Virtual Assistant. It’s a relatively new branding (November 2013) for a product, originally known as Q-go, from a privately held, Amsterdam, NE-based supplier of the same name. Q-go was first commercially deployed in 2001. Now it’s part of Oracle’s Cloud-based Customer Service portfolio.

Neither RightNow, which acquired Q-go in 2011, nor Oracle, which acquired RightNow in 2013, has done very much to enhance the old Q-go other than to rebrand it. (RightNow branded it RightNow Intent Guide and Natural Language Search at the time of the 2011 Q-go acquisition. As we mentioned just above, Oracle branded it Virtual Assistant in November 2013.) Today, Oracle Service Cloud Virtual Assistant doesn’t support voice. It deploys on web browsers in HTML. Its deployments are language-specific and only Western European languages are supported.

New Focus on Customer Service Integration by Major Customer Service Suppliers

In Q1 2014, eGain, IntelliResponse, and Oracle announced new customer service integration. The eGain SAP Certified integration allows contact center agents to search and access the eGain Knowledge Base from the SAP CRM agent console using eGain’s FAQs, natural-language and keyword search queries, topic trees, and guided help search methods. The IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA) for Salesforce integrates IntelliResponse VA with Salesforce Service Cloud, adding virtual assisted-service to the Service Cloud Console, the Customer Portal, and Service Cloud Communities. In the Oracle Service Cloud February 2014 release, the dynamic forms API for the Customer Portal enables developers to configure a page that asks the customer for additional information, dynamically, before submitting the incident.

Customer Service Integration is one of the key criteria in all of our frameworks for evaluating customer service products. Customer service integration can reduce cost to serve and increase customer satisfaction. Integration expands and streamlines the customer service experience. It makes it easier for customers to get answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. It makes it easier for customer service agents to help customers.

Customer Service Suppliers’ Quarterly Update

This week, continuing our tenth year of quarterly updates on the suppliers and products in customer service, we published our 3Q2013 Customer Service Update Report. Just a reminder, these reports examine customer service suppliers and their products along the dimensions of customer growth, financial performance, product activity, and company activity. We currently cover 10 leading customer service suppliers: Clarabridge, Creative Virtual, eGain, Intelliresponse, Kana, Moxie, Next IT, Nuance, Oracle, and Salesforce.com. They lead in overall market influence and share, in market segment influence and share, and/or in product technology and innovation. These firms provide a variety of customer service software solutions, most of them hosted in the cloud and accessible via mobile devices. Their solutions include customer service case management, knowledge management, and process management, tools to support agent and customer collaboration, and tools to monitor and analyze customer conversations on social networks and respond to them. Some of these firms provide virtual assisted-service using virtual agents. Others provide Voice of the Customer monitoring, analysis, and interaction. Some provide targeted marketing offers based on customers’ interactions.

Social Customer Service Is Built into Oracle Service Cloud Social Experience Product

This week, we are publishing our evaluation of the August 2013 Release of Oracle Service Cloud Social Experience. You may be more familiar with the product by its former RightNow CX Social Experience or Oracle RightNow Cloud Service Social Experience names. Oracle acquired RightNow in January 2012 and, without a formal announcement, renamed the product sometime during 2Q2013. One other point about the acquisition—the former RightNow R&D team has continued to develop the product, has continued to work out of the former RightNow headquarters site in Bozeman, and has continued the regular, quarterly releases of the product.

Social Experience is one of three “Experiences” in Oracle Social Cloud. The other two are Agent Experience and Web Experience. Each is aptly named for the channel that it supports. The three share a base of common data (Customers, accounts, cases, and knowledge items, for example) and services including business rules, process management, user management, and reporting. Also, product packaging and pricing puts Social Experience “in the box” with Agent and Web Experience. So, social customer service is really built into Oracle Service Cloud, and that’s its key strength and differentiator.

Oracle’s Integration of Twitter for Customer Service

Last week, Patty Seybold published, “Four Reasons Why Customers Prefer Twitter for Customer Service,” a report about how businesses and their customers use Twitter as a key channel for customer service. Patty proposes seven best practices for Twitter-based customer service. Oracle Service Cloud Social Experience can help implement four of the seven:

• Treat Twitter as an Integrated Customer Service Channel
• If You Have Lots of Customers, Establish Customer Service Twitter Accounts
• Defuse Anger Publicly; Take the Issue Private
• Gather Customers’ Ideas for Next-Gen Products.

You’ll implement the other three with customer service policies, standards, and procedures:

• Set Customers’ Expectations Re: Times of Day You’ll Respond to Tweets in Real Time
• Respond within Minutes
• Don’t Use Automated Responses!

Here are brief descriptions of how Oracle Service Cloud Social Experience helps implement the first four practices:

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.

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.

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.

Oracle to Acquire ATG

Big news in ecommerce last week. On November 2, Oracle announced its intention to acquire ATG. This is a $1 billion acquisition that will close during 1Q2011 when Oracle buys all of ATG’s stock at $6.00 per share. $1 billion is about five times ATG’s current revenue. The $6.00 price per share is almost a 50 percent premium over recent share prices.

The companies describe the rationale for the acquisition as their approach to addressing the requirement for cross-channel commerce, a requirement driven by a convergence of online and traditional commerce. That approach is a unified CRM, retail and commerce platform. Oracle has the CRM and retail systems. ATG brings the commerce, commerce that includes merchandising and customer service as well as the traditional catalog, shopping cart, transaction processing, and account management.

The rationale makes sense. There is absolutely a cross-channel commerce requirement. Ecommerce suppliers had begun to address in the past two or three years with merchandising, shopping carts, and transaction support on mobile channels, social channels. They’ve also begun to support the contact center channel with offerings that put the standard ecommerce applications on agents desktops with added capabilities for order management, returns and refunds, and account management. ATG Commerce already supported mobile and social channels. ATG Commerce Service Center, an add-on feature, provided contact center support. (We evaluated it in March 2008.) However, ATG Commerce does not provide the marketing, sales, customer service, and account management capabilities of CRM systems. It also does not have the order management and distribution capabilities of retail systems. That’s the stuff that Oracle brings to the deal. In time, a unified, cross-channel commerce, CRM, and retail platform could result.

Integrated Customer Service Knowledge Management Needs to Span Self-Service, Assisted Service, Case Management, and Contact Center Solutions

The Web and the contact center are the two critical channels for cross-channel customer service—the Web for self-service and the contact center for assisted-service. Customer portals are the mechanism for delivering self-service on the Web. Agent desktops are the mechanism for delivering assisted-service through the contact center.

Knowledge management-based customer service offerings can be the key to delivering customer service across both these channels. For Web self-service, they typically offer portal-like UIs. For contact center-based assisted-service, their integration with the case/incident capabilities of the agent desktops in contact center offerings can be the key to helping agents/CSRs deliver more effective, more efficient, and more consistent customer service. InQuira iConnect provides that integration between its InQuira 8 knowledge management offering and leading contact center products.