RightNow Enables Seamless Social Interactions With Your Customers

RightNow Technologies (NASDAQ:RNOW), Bozeman based company offering a comprehensive Customer eXperience Suite, yesterday announced the extension of their Suite to support Facebook. With this new addition, RightNow Technologies is taking their customers right to the doors of these social networking sites.

The Problem

In today’s world, customers are more empowered than ever due to the new social technologies available at their disposal. Unlike the previous era where businesses had complete control over the messaging, the new social web era offers way too many outlets for customers to talk more openly about their experiences with businesses. For some time, businesses were totally clueless about how they can manage such distributed conversations. Slowly, they started positioning their ears near the places where customer conversations were taking place. However, the tools they used were totally inadequate to meet the challenges of the social era.

There were not many solutions in the market that helped businesses reach these communities from within their existing customer care platforms. At times, this lead to complete breakdown of customer service resulting in irreparable damage. More importantly, not many vendors were offering such customer experience solutions using the SaaS model.

RightNow Solution

RightNow developed a SaaS solution called RightNow CX Suite which offers comprehensive set of applications that could help businesses reach out to customers better, thereby, driving more revenue, increase efficiency and better loyalty. As the world changed towards more web centric and increased online social interactions, there was a clear need to go beyond the traditional customer portal with Helpdesk, Knowledge Base, etc..

The underlying platform for RightNow CX Suite is their “Cloud Platform” which offers RightNow App Builder which will help their customers to extend and integrate their customer experience apps based on their needs. The other element is RightNow Knowledge Foundation which helps in authoring and delivering relevant knowledge across all customer interactions. The third and crucial element is RightNow Mission Critical Operations which ensures performance, scalability, security, compliance, DR, etc..

On top of their “Cloud Platform” is the other important component of their Suite, RightNow Engage. It helps integrate an organization’s service, sales, marketing, and feedback functions, with the external experience channels customers use to interact with them. This also offers analytics tools that will help gain better insight and help build customer loyalty.

The front end for this Suite offers three types of experiences that an organization can leverage to offer better customer experience.

Web Experience – The usual web front end for sales, helpdesk and knowledgebase
Social Experience – This is used to monitor the social web and, also, for building community
Contact Center Experience – This is an enhanced version of the “Contact Us” page most organization have in their web presence

Cutting all the marketing crap, RightNow Suite is basically an unified platform that helps organizations better manage their interactions with customers. Their main selling point is the ease with which organizations can manage their customers and build loyalty. The most interesting aspect of this suite is the ability to integrate the social web. This is very important for organizations of all sizes as more and more of their customers are talking about them on these social sites.

Yesterday’s Announcement

Yesterday, RightNow announced the extension of their CX Suite to offer support for Facebook. This will allow organizations to seamlessly deliver exceptional customer service experiences to their consumers and fans across Facebook’s global social network. Though the details are still vague, my interpretation is that this tool not only allows organizations to monitor and escalate the incidents, it also lets them engage the customers with their brand (probably through Facebook page). Already, we are seeing some startups tackling the problem of engaging with customers in the distributed social web. RightNow’s solution brings these tools right into the platform many organizations are already using. It will be interesting to watch how this space shapes up.