NETTING IT OUT

We currently follow ten customer service suppliers—Clarabridge, Creative Virtual, eGain, IntelliResponse, Kana, Moxie, Next IT, Nuance, Oracle, Salesforce.

We provide updates on each company and its customer service products each quarter. 3Q2013 was a good quarter for customer service. Customer growth was up. Creative Virtual, Moxie, and Salesforce.com all had significantly improved customer growth quarters in both acquisition and repeat business. All of our suppliers improved in either acquisition or repeat business.

Financial performance was up. Creative Virtual, Moxie, and Salesforce.com lead the pack.

Product activity was light. Six of the suppliers we follow made no product announcements. Among the others, there were no new products announced, just new versions, point releases, new features, and new solutions that packaged existing products.

Company activity was mixed. The most significant activity was expansion into new markets—Latin America for Clarabridge, Australia and New Zealand for IntelliResponse, Europe for Moxie, and the insurance industry via a partnership with Wipro for KANA. On the other hand, four suppliers made no company announcements.

Moxie and Salesforce.com earned Customer Service Stars for 3Q2013 with excellent and balanced performance across customer growth, financial performance, products, and company activity.

There are two key customer service trends we noted this quarter. First, the distinction between web and mobile channels is fading, as mobile devices have become larger and more powerful. Second, customer service is going global as these suppliers expand into European, Latin American, and Pacific markets.

With this report, we continue our tenth 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…(more)

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