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

Combining Content Curation with Customer Communities

By Sue McKittrick

What’s the best way to lure customers to your web site and to your wares and to keep them coming back for more? 1) Provide compelling, seductive, timely, and relevant information to your target audience—not sales pitches, but authoritative information from objective third parties and great tips from their peers. 2) Make sure that targeted information turns up everywhere your target audience is likely to go—not just on your web site, but also on others’ sites, in the social media conversations they follow, and in the news. 3) Supplement your online forums with relevant tidbits of 3rd party information that address your customers’ concerns, pique their interest, and stimulate dialog.

It’s tough to grow a vibrant online customer community. It takes a lot of care and feeding and a lot of fresh information to keep your audience engaged. That’s why many of the “content curation” solutions that have been pouring into the market over the last three years are now addressing online communities as well as enterprise-level content curation.

There are now over 20 different suppliers of content curation tools. By and large, these solutions are designed for marketers and for publishers. They provide content aggregation, filtering, and categorization services that yield pre-categorized excerpts of articles and blog posts that are timely and relevant for your targeted audience(s). These content curation solutions typically offer workflows that speed up the job of finding, organizing, adding valuable commentary to the article excerpts, and getting internal approvals to publish those links and commentaries. They also manage the distribution of the targeted content via email, social media, and/or into your online (public and private) user communities. As these solutions evolve, so does our advice about how to select the right solution for your needs. This week, Sue McKittrick offers the third version of her Content Curation Evaluation Framework. Even if you aren’t “in the market” for content curation tools, this up-to-date description of the state of the art in content curation is worth reading, if only to understand what’s possible!

Content Curation Evaluation Framework, Version 3
What to Consider When Evaluating Content Curation Platforms for Marketing
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, September 8, 2011

Want Marketing Success? Examine Your Internal Processes Before You Invest in Technology!

By Patricia Seybold

Today’s marketers need to use social media, email, mobile, and web technologies to effectively target and personalize their messages. Ideally, all of these targeted and personalized “campaigns” are managed by an integrated suite of marketing automation tools.

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing niches in the technology landscape for good reason: it enables marketers to personalize their nurturing of leads and get higher conversion rates. Personalized marketing results in higher conversion rates for self-service sales, better quality leads to sales people for assisted sales, and, of course, higher revenues. It also helps marketers reduce creative production costs, cut short poorly performing campaigns, and improve predictability of revenue.

However, too many marketers view the technology as the panacea, so they often select and start to implement technologies, such as marketing automation systems, before addressing their own organizational issues and business process requirements.

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.

Empowering Your Subject Matter Experts to Engage with Social Media

By Patricia Seybold and Susan McKittrick

In B2B marketing, experts' content lures prospects and drives online engagement…but the marketers who run these marketing campaigns, by and large, usually aren’t the technical experts in the content areas that interest their company’s customers. It's often hard for marketers to get the real experts in the company to participate in social media conversations; these SMEs are too busy and/or they undervalue the results that can be obtained by commenting publicly and/or contributing their own perspectives to the topics of interest to customers.

That's why we became interested in a social media curation and commenting platform that's designed to help professional subject matter experts become social media curators and commenters. ConnectedN focuses on your experts' needs to:

a) Identify interesting content from trusted sources

b) Highlight or comment on that content on a branded microsite

c) Get legal/marketing approvals for any content or commentary that needs it

c) Redistribute links to highlighted content and/or the expert's comments on third-party content to a variety of social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

d) Control the time(s) of the day/week, etc. that they devote to reviewing and commenting on potentially relevant and useful content

ConnectedN’s Content Curation for Social Media Engagement
Enabling Busy Subject Matter Experts to Deliver Valuable Content to Clients and Prospects
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 24, 2011

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.

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