NETTING IT OUT

4Q2013 was a good quarter for customer service.

Customer growth was up. Clarabridge improved significantly in both customer acquisition and repeat business. Creative Virtual, IntelliResponse, KANA, and Moxie improved in either customer acquisition or repeat business. Surprisingly, only Salesforce.com had a down customer growth quarter.

Financial performance was up as a result. IntelliResponse had its best quarter ever. Creative Virtual, Moxie, and Salesforce.com also had very good quarters.

Product activity was very heavy. Nine of our suppliers made product announcements. Clarabridge, eGain, IntelliResponse, KANA, Nuance, Oracle, and Salesforce.com introduced new product versions or product enhancements. Salesforce.com announced significant new products.

Company activity was light. Most significantly, KANA was acquired by Verint. Five suppliers did not make any company announcements.

Moxie earned a Customer Service Stars for 4Q2013. Salesforce.com earned a Customer Service Star for the all of 2013.

One continuing customer service trend. Customer service capabilities on web and mobile channels are virtually equivalent as mobile devices have become larger and more powerful and suppliers implement additional functionality on these platforms. This quarter Saleforce.com introduced Salesforce1, a new version of its cloud-computing platform. On Salesforce1, mobile apps can access all resources and services, even admin services.

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

With this report, we complete 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 quar-terly 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, ongo-ing 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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