NETTING IT OUT

2Q2011 was mixed quarter for customer service.

Customer growth was especially mixed for the quarter. Only one of our suppliers—Salesforce.com—improved in both new and repeat customers. Three others improved in customer acquisition but were flat or down in repeat customers. Three others were flat or down in customer acquisition but improved in repeat customers.

Mixed financial performance resulted. Only eGain had a big financial quarter with significant improvements in both revenue and income.

2Q2011 was a big product quarter for four of our ten suppliers. Attensity Group, eGain, and KANA introduced multiple new products.

Company activity was low in the quarter. Five of our suppliers did not make any company announcements. KANA and Salesforce.com made or completed significant acquisitions. The biggest company news was Oracle’s acquisition of InQuira.

One of our suppliers earned Customer Service Stars for 2Q2011: (Download the PDF to see which one).

Social-service is the hottest trend in customer service. We call it social-service because it’s about customers using social networks to get answers to their questions and solutions to their problems by monitoring and searching social media.

QUARTERLY REPORTS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE SUPPLIERS AND THEIR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

With this report, 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. More specifically, we examine these factors in our quarterly updates:

• Customer acquisition and overall customer growth
• Product activity
• Company activity including mergers and acquisitions, partnerships and alliances, and hiring
• Company financial performance

In our evaluations of quarterly performance, we want to see continuing customer growth, ongoing improvements in products, steady company viability, and good financial performance. We don’t want to change our evaluations based on a quarter’s news, but we do want to raise a red flag when that news deviates from a positive, multi-quarter trend, or to wave a green flag when that news is particularly good. When significant product and company events occur, we identify and highlight those that could have an impact on customer service products and technologies, suppliers, and the market landscape.

Customer Service Suppliers and Products

Here are the 10 customer service suppliers and products that we cover:

• Astute Solutions ePowerCenter and RealDialog
• Attensity Group E-Service, Voice of Customer Suite, Social Media Suite
• Consona Corporation Knowledge Driven Support and Knowledge Management
• eGain Service
• InQuira 8
• IntelliResponse Answer Suite
• KANA 10 Service Experience Management
• Moxie Software Customer Spaces Knowledgebase (formerly nGenera CIM nGen KB)
• RightNow CX
• Salesforce.com Service Cloud

A Mixed 2Q2011 in Customer Service

Customer service performance was mixed for the quarter...