NETTING IT OUT

RightNow Social Experience is the social-service offering from RightNow Technologies, Inc. RightNow Social Experience, along with RightNow Web Experience and RightNow Contact Center Experience, are the components of RightNow CX, the firm’s suite of case management, knowledge management, account management, and contact center management applications for self-service, assisted-service and social-service channels.

Organizations purchase subscription licenses for RightNow Social Experience for its cloud deployment. These components are Cloud Monitor, Channels, RightNow Community, and RightNow for Facebook. To date, RightNow claims that approximately 200 of the 2,000 customer organizations in the RightNow CX customer base have licensed components of RightNow Social Experience.

RightNow Social Experience earns good grades on the Customer Social-Service Report Card—exceeds-requirements grades in customer service integration and meets-requirements in analytic functionality, product viability, and company viability.

RightNow Social Experience best fits customer social-service with these characteristics:

• Consumer-oriented organization
• RightNow CX deployments

If these characteristics match your organization and the products that you offer, then RightNow Social Experience can an excellent choice for the software to help deliver excellent customer service on the social web. Note that as we were finalizing this report, Oracle has announced its intention to acquire RightNow. The acquisition should not prevent current RightNow CX users from licensing RightNow Social Experience.

RightNow Community Activity Report

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2011 RightNow Technologies, Inc.

Illustration 1. This illustration shows an example of the RightNow Community Activity report.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Answer Customers’ Questions and Solve Customers’ Problems

Customer service products help organizations deliver answers to their customers’ questions and solutions to their problems through their case management, knowledge management, account management, and social network management capabilities, capabilities that support self-service, assisted-service, and social-service channels. These products help answer and solve customers’ questions and problems about products and services, about business policies, processes, and practices, or about the elements of their customer relationships such as accounts, bills, orders, and contracts.

Customer Service in the Social Cloud—Customer Social-Service

These days, customers spend much of their time online in the social cloud. Some of that time is spent on the products and services that they use in their lives or that they use to do their jobs. They want help from their peers to learn about those products and the products’ suppliers, to get advice on purchasing decisions, and to get answers and solutions to questions and problems in installing and using the products. In other words, customers get customer service in the social cloud.

It certainly follows that suppliers should deliver customer service to the social cloud. How? They must be aware of customer conversations about them and their products. They should try to ensure that the answers and solutions that customers receive from their peers are correct. They should deliver the answers and solutions themselves. And they must try to interact with customers publicly or directly to help customers find correct answers and solutions.

Social-service products help suppliers deliver customer service to the social cloud.

RIGHTNOW SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

RightNow Social Experience is a standard feature of RightNow CX, the firm’s Customer Experience Suite that provides...