NETTING IT OUT

4Q2009 was a very good quarter for KM-based customer service.

Customer growth improved and/or good financial performance resulted for nine of our ten suppliers.

Product activity was very high in 4Q2009. There were new products or major new versions from Attensity Group, Consona CRM, eGain, InQuira, IntelliResponse, RightNow, and Salesforce.com.

We see four key product trends in KM-based customer service: Integration of social media as both a customer interaction channel and a knowledge source and support for assisted-service continue to be hot; mobile computing and cloud computing are coming on.

From a company perspective, there was one major M&A item in the quarter. KANA went private.

Two of our ten suppliers earned Customer Service Stars for 4Q2009: Attensity Group and IntelliResponse. Both demonstrated strong customer growth and strong financial performance. Both introduced innovative new products and new product versions.

KM-based customer service is positioned for a very good start in 2010.

Knowledge Management (KM)-Based Customer Service

4Q2009 was a good quarter for KM-based customer service. After a run of seven excellent quarters, growth in KM-based customer service slowed in 1Q2009. Business rebounded in 2Q2009 and increased in 3Q2009 with improved customer growth and resulting good financial performance. 4Q2009 was the best quarter of the year!

Customer Growth for Eight of Ten Customer Services Suppliers

Customer growth and/or financial performance were up in 4Q2009 for eight of the ten suppliers that we cover: Astute Solutions, Attensity Group, eGain, IntelliResponse, KANA, and nGenera CIM all combined improved customer growth and improved financial performance. InQuira, RightNow, and Salesforce.com were flat or slightly down in customer growth but had improved financial performance.

High Levels of Product Activity

Significant KM-based customer service products were announced in 4Q2009. Seven of our ten suppliers introduced important products. Here are the highlights:

• Attensity Group announced a new version of Attensity Cloud, Attensity Analyze for Voice of the Customer 5.2, and Empolis:Service Lifecycle Suite 6.1. In addition, Attensity Group and Vovici jointly announced a partnership to deliver a SaaS-based loyalty solution.
• Consona CRM made three product announcements during 4Q2009. On October 5, Consona announced that it plans to unveil a cloud-based deployment option early in 2010. On October 19, the firm announced GA of Consona Knowledge Driven Support (KDS) 10 and Consona Knowledge Management 7.3.
• eGain’s big product news of 4Q2009 was the announcement of eGain Service 9, a major new version of its customer service suite.
• IntelliResponse announced an application for Facebook that lets organizations deploy IntelliResponse on their Facebook Fanpages. Visitors can enter questions in a search box on a Fanpage and receive the “one right answer” as well as related and suggested questions, top 10 questions, answer ratings, and session summaries.
• InQuira announced iConnect for Oracle’s Siebel Contact Center, its first iConnect offering. iConnect integrates InQuira’s KM-based customer service capabilities with contact center applications. InQuira also introduced InQuira 8.2. This point release includes a feature called iAssist that provides facilities for agents to help customers complete activities such as completing forms and applications.
• RightNow introduced the regular quarterly release of its software suite, RightNow CX November ’09. It includes the technology from RightNow’s acquisition of HiveLive.
• Salesforce.com introduced the regular quarterly release of its software offerings: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Force.com. Spring ’10 has many interested features, including new social media capabilities, and mobile computing capabilities. On November 18, Salesforce.com announced Salesforce Chatter. Salesforce Chatter is an application that enables real-time communication and collaboration among the employees, the Salesforce.com applications, and the Salesforce.com data within an enterprise.

Four Key Product Trends

Looking at these new products and considering what we’re hearing from their potential users, we see four key product trends in KM-based customer service:

• Social media
• Support for assisted-service
• Mobile computing
• Cloud computing

We’ve been reporting on the social media and support for assisted-service trends for ...