RightNow Social
Experience is the social-service offering from RightNow Technologies, Inc.
RightNow Social Experience, along with RightNow Web Experience and RightNow
Contact Center Experience, are the components of RightNow CX, the firm’s
suite of case management, knowledge management, account management, and contact
center management applications for self-service, assisted-service and social-service
channels.
Organizations purchase subscription licenses for RightNow Social Experience
for its cloud deployment. These components are Cloud Monitor, Channels, RightNow
Community, and RightNow for Facebook. To date, RightNow claims that approximately
200 of the 2,000 customer organizations in the RightNow CX customer base
have licensed components of RightNow Social Experience.
RightNow Social Experience earns good grades on the Customer Social-Service
Report Card—exceeds-requirements grades in customer service integration
and meets-requirements in analytic functionality, product viability, and
company viability.
RightNow Social Experience best fits customer social-service with these characteristics:
• Consumer-oriented organization
• RightNow CX deployments
If these characteristics match your organization and the products that you
offer, then RightNow Social Experience can an excellent choice for the software
to help deliver excellent customer service on the social web. Note that as
we were finalizing this report, Oracle has announced its intention to acquire
RightNow. The acquisition should not prevent current RightNow CX users from
licensing RightNow Social Experience.
RightNow Community Activity Report
(Click on image to enlarge.)
© 2011 RightNow Technologies, Inc.
Illustration 1. This illustration shows an example of the RightNow Community
Activity report.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Answer Customers’ Questions and Solve Customers’ Problems
Customer service products help organizations deliver answers to their
customers’ questions and solutions to their problems through their
case management, knowledge management, account management, and social network
management capabilities, capabilities that support self-service, assisted-service,
and social-service channels. These products help answer and solve customers’ questions
and problems about products and services, about business policies, processes,
and practices, or about the elements of their customer relationships such
as accounts, bills, orders, and contracts.
Customer Service in the Social Cloud—Customer Social-Service
These days, customers spend much of their time online in the social cloud.
Some of that time is spent on the products and services that they use in their
lives or that they use to do their jobs. They want help from their peers to
learn about those products and the products’ suppliers, to get advice
on purchasing decisions, and to get answers and solutions to questions and
problems in installing and using the products. In other words, customers get
customer service in the social cloud.
It certainly follows that suppliers should deliver customer service to the
social cloud. How? They must be aware of customer conversations about them
and their products. They should try to ensure that the answers and solutions
that customers receive from their peers are correct. They should deliver
the answers and solutions themselves. And they must try to interact with
customers publicly or directly to help customers find correct answers and
solutions.
Social-service products help suppliers deliver customer service to the social
cloud.
RIGHTNOW SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
RightNow Social Experience is a standard feature of RightNow CX, the firm’s
Customer Experience Suite that provides customer service capabilities for the
social cloud. These capabilities are:
•
Monitor customer conversations
•
Analyze customer conversations
•
Provide a community platform for customer conversations
•
Give customers access to customer self-service facilities from within the social
cloud
•
Interact with individual customers
•
Create cases from customer interactions
RightNow Social Experience was introduced in October 2009 with RightNow CX
November ’09, one of the suite’s quarterly releases. RightNow
Social Experience was a key element of RightNow’s reorganization of
RightNow CX into three “Experiences,” which are sets of channel-specific
capabilities for self-service channels, social-service channels, and assisted-service
channels—the Web Experience, Social Experience, and Contact Center
Experience, respectively.
The customer social-service capabilities of RightNow Social Experience are
implemented in these four components:
•
RightNow Community, which is an internal community platform included within
the Social Experience of RightNow CX.
•
Channels, which are the touchpoints through which organizations can communicate
with their customers. RightNow CX supports channels for each of its Experiences.
RightNow Social Experience Channels are RightNow Community, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, and RSS.
•
Cloud Monitor lets organizations monitor their customers’ conversations
in the social cloud, analyze those conversations, interact with individual
customers in the social cloud, and create cases/incidents based on those conversations
and interactions.
•
RightNow CX for Facebook, which lets organizations deploy RightNow CX
customer service and community facilities on their Facebook pages to let their
customers perform self-service activities within this social network.
Oracle | RightNow
On October 24, RightNow announced that it had entered into an agreement to
be acquired by Oracle Corporation for approximately $1.5 billion or $39 per
share of RightNow common stock. (That’s about seven times 2011 revenues
at the 1H2011 run rate, quite a handsome price.) The purchase transaction is
expected to close by late 2011 or early 2012. Per the press release, “Until
the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it
is business as usual.” Well, maybe for Oracle, but certainly not for
RightNow.
Here’s the rationale for the deal from Oracle’s perspective. Currently,
Oracle offers cloud-based sales force automation, marketing, and social networking
applications in its Oracle Fusion product line for the Oracle Public Cloud.
Customer service is a gap in the offering that can be filled by what is now
RightNow CX. The combined offering can help organizations deploy a comprehensive
customer experience. Makes sense. (Note that ecommerce is another gap in the
offering. Neither Oracle iStore nor Oracle ATG Commerce offers true cloud deployment.)
The rationale from RightNow’s perspective? Nothing was stated publicly,
but it sounds to us like Oracle made an offer that RightNow’s board and
executives couldn’t refuse.
Questions Going Forward
The rationale makes sense for Oracle. Its cloud-based, customer experience
product line is more complete with the addition of RightNow CX to address requirements
for customer service. RightNow CX provides case management, knowledge management,
and account management capabilities across self-service, assisted-service,
and social-service channels. We published an evaluation of RightNow CX May
2011on June 30, 2011. Briefly, from our evaluation, the suite exceeds requirements
in customer interaction support, channel support, escalation, and analytic
functionality. It needs improvement in UI content management. It meets requirement
for all other evaluation criteria. This report evaluates RightNow Social-service,
the social-service component of RightNow CX.