NETTING IT OUT

3Q2012 was a mixed quarter for customer service.

Customer growth was mixed. Attensity and Salesforce.com had excellent customer growth quarters.

Financial performance was mixed (or down) as a result. However, Attensity, IntelliResponse, Salesforce.com, and VirtuOz had very good financial quarters.

3Q2012 was mixed in products, too. KANA, Moxie, and Salesforce announced new products. Three suppliers did not make any product announcements.

Company activity was low. Six of our suppliers did not make any company announcements and another announced only an executive appointment. However, the other two made big M&A announcements. Consona merged with CDC Software to become Aptean; KANA acquired Ciboodle, a supplier of contact center software for large organizations.

No Customer Service Stars this quarter. While every supplier had excellent customer growth, financial performance, product, or company quarter. None were excellent across all of these dimensions.

Social-service continues as the hottest trend in customer service. Integration is on the rise, helping businesses create richer customer service experiences by linking applications from different suppliers faster, easier, and less costly.

Escalation from VirtuOz IVA to Moxie Chat Spaces

© 2012 Windstream Corp.

1. This illustration shows the integration between VirtuOz IVA and Chat Spaces for Windstream. When the customer clicks the “Yes, please transfer me to a Live Chat agent” link in Wendy’s response, the escalation is triggered.

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

With this report, we continue our ninth 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.

Changes to Customer Service Suppliers and Products

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

• Aptean Knova
• Attensity Analyze, Attensity Respond
• eGain Service, eGain Social Experience
• IntelliResponse Answer Suite
• KANA Service Experience Management, Experience Analytics
• Moxie Software Spaces
• Oracle RightNow CX
• Salesforce.com Service Cloud, Radian6
• VirtuOz, VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent

One change for the quarter. Aptean is the former Consona. On August 7, Consona Corporation merged with CDC Software to become Aptean. Both companies had offered broad lines of customer service, CRM, ERP, and supply chain applications. Both built their application portfolios through acquisition. The new Aptean is currently in the process of integrating its pieces and parts.

A Mixed 2Q2012

Overall, customer service performance was quiet for the quarter in customer growth, financial performance, product activity, and company activity. One exception. Once again Salesforce.com made a lot noise in all four areas. In a bit more detail...

(Download the PDF to read the entire Quarterly Review.)