As RightNow’s customers gathered at the Celtic Manor Resort in Wales this week, there was an elephant in the room – and his name was Larry.
The RightNow EMEA Summit was the usual example of Cloud and customer experience best practice explained by company executives such as RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte and illustrated by customers such as The TrainLine and New Zealand Post.
But hanging over the entire conference was the long shadow of Oracle which last week confirmed that it is to buy RightNow for around $1.5 billion. This is clearly something of a game changer but frustratingly unable to be part of the agenda this week as the transaction has yet to be completed and is therefore subject of complex US regulatory restrictions.
So it was business as usual. That included this year’s survey into consumer attitudes towards poor customer service. The online survey of 2,023 British adults conducted by Harris Interactive found that 90 percent of people who stop doing business with an organisation due to a poor customer experience have gone on to buy from a competitive company, while 36 percent state they will give a company less than one week to resolve customer service issues before taking their business elsewhere.
Online forums are rapidly becoming a venting ground for consumers – 21 percent of online British adults said they went on to post negative comments on a social networking site to express frustration after a poor customer experience. Despite this the vast majority of businesses however are failing to respond with 71 percent stating they have never received any kind of response.
Based on the survey results, RightNow has produced six key recommendations for excellent customer experiences:
Pick up the phone! 56 percent noted that their expectations were not met because the company was unavailable; they didn’t pick up the phone or answer email.
Shake a leg! 58 percent said the company was slow to resolve their issues.
Get clued up! 54 percent said the company was clueless, it sometimes felt like the consumer knew more about the company than the agent.
Be friendly! 48 percent surveyed said the company was impersonal; sometimes the agent couldn’t even get their customer’s name right.
Provide the personal touch! 27 percent said the company was forgetful, they didn’t remember the consumer even if they had recently talked to an agent.
Get social! 8% said the company was anti-social; they were nowhere to be found on social networking sites.
One company held up as an example of an organisation that does understand the importance of the customer experience is The Trainline, a long time RightNow customer which has now embedded the RightNow offering into its mobile app.
“ Our customer model is to make it as easy and convenient for people to interact with us as possible. Convenience is where mobile plays. People aren’t always at their desktops so you want to use your mobile device. ”
He added:
“ Having an application on a mobile phone also opens up a new price point in the market for us. We have been built around the long distance journey where you book in advance and you save money. But for some of the shorter, commuter-based journeys there is no difference in price if you book a minute before or a month before. Mobile helps us to get a foot in that commuter marketplace. ”
The Trainline has been a RightNow customer since 2008 and was built from the ground-up as an online business – or what would nowadays be called a Cloud business. It does however run on premise Oracle software which is used for its transactional database.
So when RightNow becomes Oracle, The Trainline won’t be in entirely alien waters. “Ask me again in a year,” joked Hopkins when asked how he felt about the forthcoming takeover, adding that the idea that Oracle was interested enough in RightNow was “a pleasant surprise”. But he added a word of caution to Oracle:
“ If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! ”
Reassuring words perhaps for RIghtNow. In one of his few cautious comments on the subject of Oracle, Gianforte said:
“ We have had a lot of positive comments from clients. ”
On more comfortable ground, the RightNow CEO warmed to the broader theme of the social business and the impact of the social networking technologies on the customer experience:
“Some 25% of all tweets are now brand or product related. People are talking about your brand out there in the twittersphere. The question is whether you are listening and participating. You can choose to ignore large sections of your customers, but… ”
It will be a case of organisations getting used to the shift in thinking to embrace the full customer experience potential of social media:
“ It’s not that different to email 15 years ago. At first companies just ignored email really and said that if customers wanted to get in touch they’d have to phone and use the contract centre. You know, it didn’t work out that way, did it? ”
