Third Idea Consulting

I’ve just spent (and am still spending) a busy and informative demi-week at the RightNow Summit in lovely Colorado Springs, and I’m glad I came. Greg Gianforte and company are doing some very smart things.I’ve dinged RightNow in the past for sometimes lacking in effective media/analyst outreach, but that appears to no longer be the case, and the timing is excellent.

The reason for my enthusiasm is that RightNow’s message of customer experience is now a product and a strategy, CX. The social CRM and SaaS stars are finally in alignment, and the RightNow CX customer experience suite that Greg G. announced on Tuesday was born under those auspices. My tweets from that morning’s general session will give you some idea of what RightNow CX is all about, but I’ll summarize it here in a more coherent fashion. I’ve got to rely on text because I’m having trouble getting slides to work, but bullet lists are clear enough.

From the ground up, there are five main components of RightNow CX, each containing part of the package. RightNow CX Platform is the technology that supports the traditional CRM functions of RightNow Engage, which in turn supports the three customer experience components (Web Experience, Social Experience, and Contact Center Experience). Thus,

RightNow CX Platform

• Knowledge management
• Integration
• Mission-critical SaaS (more about this later)

RightNow Engage

• Marketing
• Voice of the Customer
• Sales
• Analytics

RightNow Web Experience

• Customer Portal (including Web self-service and mobile)
• Chat and Co-Browse
• Email Management
• Web Experience Design

RightNow Social Experience

• Support communities
• Innovation communities
• Cloud monitoring
• Social experience design

RightNow Contact Center Experience

• Phone and multichannel interaction management
• Case management
• Voice automation
• Contact center experience design (including desktop workflow, agent scripting, and contextual workspaces)

Mission-critical SaaS includes something the company is calling Invisible Updates, with elimination of downtime as the goal. The concept appears similar to Salesforce.com’s 5-minute upgrades, but RightNow is aiming for true seamlessness. It also prides itself on having always provided service level agreements with teeth—the company cuts checks for its customers when downtime exceeds what’s spelled out in the SLA. It’ll be fun to see how the two rivals stack up in this matter.

A lot of the new customer experience functionality, especially the knowledge base and Social Experience parts, are the fruit of RightNow’s acquisition of HiveLive in September of this year, followed by what must be the fastest assimilation of technology since Star Trek introduced the Borg. A six-week turnaround from acquisition to deployment was unheard of before this, as far as I know.

RightNow takes the position that customer experience is everything, and is making “ridding the world of bad experiences” its goal. The path to achieving this leads through the contact center, and recognizes the power of the customer to make or break a business no matter how good the products might be. Numbers from the 2009 Customer Experience Impact Report (commissioned by RightNow from Harris Interactive) back this up:

• 86% of consumers will never go back to a company after a bad customer experience
• 60% will always or often pay more for a better customer experience (up from 58% in 2008)
• 82% who had a bad customer experience told others about it (up from 67% in 2006)
• 53% will recommend a company to someone else because they provide outstanding service

To illustrate the potential impact of one bad experience, we were treated to one more showing of the “United Breaks Guitars” video—but with a twist, because Dave Carroll (the creator) took the stage partway through to finish out the song and give us a first-hand account of his experiences. As he finished up, he revealed what I’d call PR gold for him and RightNow: Carroll’s only option for getting to the conference was to fly United, and the airline lost his luggage. If you listen carefully, you can hear United’s market capitalization dropping even further than the $180 million attributed to the initial incident.

If RightNow CX Platform is as good as it looks, and the company is true to its word, 2010 could very well be RightNow’s year. Every single one of Greg G’s customer visits in the past three to four months (he’s done more than 300 customer visits in the past 18 months) has had social CRM as a focus—driven by the customers, pulling RightNow into the conversation. That’s encouraging to me, since I’d hate to have established a practice in a field nobody cares about.

You’ll also be glad to know that I am now officially Huge On Twitter, at least as far as the PR team from Horn Group and RightNow Technology is concerned. I hope to continue living up to the accolade.

Hey folks: I’m at a conference with functioning WiFi! It’s RightNow Summit ‘09, and we’re just a few minutes away from the opening address. Look for my live updates on Twitter, and a full account of the news later today. Anything I don’t get, you should be able to learn from Christopher Musico of CRM magazine, Esteban Kolsky, or Forrester Research’s Dr. Natalie Petouhoff.

The busy part has ended for the moment. Here’s what you missed—or got from somebody else, I don’t mind. For those of you who might criticize me for cramming multiple updates into one post, too bad. I want to get these things off my plate, and they’re conceptually related.

1. Salesforce.com announced updates to Service Cloud, the award-winning customer service component for its SaaS business computing environment. It’s now called Service Cloud 2, based on changes to the way it all works as the integration with InStranet has progressed. Salesforce.com fans will be glad to know that the Twitter integration is available now for free download, and tentative dates have been attached to the other two components (the knowledge base and the crowdsourced customer service).

I will tell you it’s looking very good, and I stand by my assessment of Service Cloud’s potential in the first linked article. One of the key concepts Service Cloud is built on is that a great many customers turn to the Internet for help before (or instead of) asking the vendor, and building customer service around this is going to be big for Salesforce.com. The announcement, however, is very similar to what we saw in January—if there’s one thing I can regularly ding that company for, it’s the issuance of multiple press releases for what is essentially the same news. It’s more a journalistic quibble than a complaint about their business practices—the fact remains that Salesforce.com has become a billion-dollar concern by making sure nobody forgets what they’re up to.

2. RightNow signed an agreement to acquire HiveLive, the social networking platform vendor. I’ve met and spoken with HiveLive before (though not recently enough to have had any inkling of the buyout), and I’ve got to say this is potentially an excellent move by RightNow. Greg Gianforte’s Bozeman, MT-based RightNow has always been very strong in the customer service end of CRM, and the move to community-based help environments impacts that. HiveLive’s platform is highly customizable and capable, so if all goes well RightNow will have just what it needs to make itself the go-to provider of SaaS customer service, Web self-service, and e-commerce apps.

There are a number of ifs, of course. Buying technology isn’t the same as integrating it; I’m still waiting for the Salesnet acquisition from 2006 to bear visible fruit. And I can’t say for certain where the deal came from or where it’s going, because—unlike rival Salesforce.com—RightNow tends to be very closed-mouthed about its activities, and the company doesn’t make nearly enough regular noise for its own good. (This time it’s understandable though, because certain messages need to be held until the markets close.)

Caveats aside, I think it’s a good move. I am imagining the combined product and it’s awesome. Here’s hoping there’s something to see very soon, at least by the RightNow Summit this October.

[UPDATE 9/15/2009, noonish] Regardless of what I think about RightNow having slipped a bit in the industry’s perception, the company is still doing right by its customers; Three of its implementations won Gartner/1to1 enterprise CRM awards today. Congratulations to RightNow, iRobot, Distance Minnesota, and National Cable Networks. See the release here.

3. I spent Wednesday afternoon at the live component of an Acxiom Webinar, which you can view here. David Daniels of Forrester Research was the leadoff speaker, giving a great talk about the relevancy of the messages and channels businesses use to engage customers. He was followed by Chriss Marriott, Acxiom’s global managing director and vice president, who presented his ideas on “Winning Elections in the Marketing Democracy,” a clever way of discussing the use of social CRM for marketing. It was a pretty low-key session, but informative and even inspiring. If you need a primer on the ROI of social media in marketing, you could do worse than watch the recording. David and Chris are both very engaging speakers, and the day provided me some new ideas on how to open discussions.

So it’s shaping up to be a busy, if short, week. While I was busy absorbing and writing about the Oracle-InQuira announcement you read about yesterday, I nearly missed an announcement from Salesforce.com. (You can see the details of that news here, including a few of my comments on it.) And while I was tracking that down, RightNow Technologies snuck in a little bit of news of their own, to wit the acquisition of HiveLive.

I’d give you the lowdown on the RNOW news, but in addition to getting a handle on that, I need to prep for a social media marketing event here in New York hosted by Axciom.

Oy.

I’ll provide a summary after the crazy has settled to an acceptable level. Salesforce news = cool, RNOW news = smart (I think), Axciom event = informative (probably).

It might not have been an “eventful” period since my last entry, but there are definitely a lot of things going on in the social media world—enough that I’ve been having some trouble narrowing down my thoughts to one topic. As such, I’ll touch on a number of different things, part-linkdump, part commentary.

More social media guidelines. I’m glad to see that Intel isn’t the only big company getting serious enough about social media engagement to codify its approach (see my previous post here). A recent post on FastForward Blog notes similar efforts by IBM, Sun, and RightNow. Thing 1: The FastForward writer says he was told RightNow’s guidelines were partly shaped by what Intel, IBM, and Sun had set down. Does this mean there’s already a second (or third, or 12th) generation of such corporate policies floating around for the public to see? I hope so. Thing 2: Oracle acquired Sun in April, after failing to reach terms with IBM. I wonder how the acquisition will affect Sun’s social policy, or for that matter Oracle’s.

A man and his brand. Last month (sorry, didn’t see it until a few days ago) filmmaker/author/Jersey boy Kevin Smith did some heavy Q&A for readers of Decider before a live appearance. You can read it here. (NSFW if you’re not allowed to read profanity, or if a guy who answers questions while smoked up is against company policy. I pity those who fit this description.) Say what you want about Kevin Smith (I dig him), this is a guy who really understands himself, his audience, and his industry. He understands it better than major studios who think viral marketing can be made to order and posted to the MySpace and put into the YouTubes. This is a successful creator who knows where he’s from, and what created his fan following, and stays in touch with it without pandering to it. His answer to the third question sums it up well:

Many celebrities seem to guard every shed of privacy they can get their hands on, yet you have always been a very accessible public figure. With a SModcast, a blog, your Evenings With series, and a Twitter, your life seems to be an open book. What drives you to let people into your life in such an intimate way?

I don’t know any other way to be, really. Once media was created that allowed a dialogue to open between filmmakers and audience, there was no way I couldn’t embrace it. This is a communications medium, film. We do this to get a reaction and hear what people have to say about our work. It’s enormously flattering when someone (or lots of someones) are interested in you enough as an artist to wanna know about your life and opinions beyond the actual work that brought you to their attention in the first place. [...]

Kevin Smith is his own successful brand, and he got that way by never trying to be a brand, or be anything other than what he is: a comic-book fan, a regular guy, a sarcastic observer of what he grew up around. I’m not saying that a manufacturer of backed abrasives can have the same ease in relating to its customers, but it’s an ideal to consider whenever social CRM is on the table.

A duel of trust. As our online relationships become broader and more diffuse, we’re starting to ask who we can trust. It’s not surprising that surveys are being conducted on just that topic, nor is it surprising that different sources are getting different answers. The Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (via Adweek) says trust of consumer reviews and opinions—other than those of personally-known individuals—is at 70 percent. The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, however, says there is “strong to complete distrust” of anonymous consumer reviews, and only about 33 percent trust of online friends’ recommendations. That’s an awfully wide chasm to bridge. To be fair, though, in the Razorfish report 86 percent of respondents say that “whom they trust is dependent on the type of product.” I don’t imagine a war between these opposing points of view, but trust is an important issue that we need to make sure stays current. I’d say it’s more important to figure out what creates trust than to identify its strongest locii, but that route opens the possibility of manipulating trust—something businesses are often all too willing to try. See this New York Times column by Bob Herbert for an idea of what I mean.

Update 1: Shortly after writing this, I came across the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer. (PDF link.) It’s a bit more general than the two above, but still quite valuable. Thanks to Prem Kumar Aparanji (@prem_k) and Josh Weinberger (@kitson) for the tip.

Update 2: Also shortly after writing this, I realized I’d left out my take on the United Airlines broken guitar saga. I’ll save that for my next post.

That’s all for now. Keep an ear open for the next podcast of Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary as the CRM Playaz. It’s coming soon, and these two are always on point and entertaining. No link yet, but Paul’s pretty reliable about putting linkage on his ZDNet blog.