RightNow Technologies has debuted browser-based business intelligence
and Twitter monitoring tools in its latest quarterly upgrade.
The
upgrade finds the company moving deeper into brower-based enterprise
analytics with what it calls 'business insight on demand'. This
includes an on-demand data warehouse facility and pre-built business
intelligence (BI) features that allow enterprises to move customer data
into an analytics environment.
Vice president of products David
Vap explained that the BI features are integrated directly into the
agent desktop. "It's all in the same environment. Our claim to fame is
getting our customers up and running quickly, so the last thing we
wanted was a data warehouse that has all the common problems that the
environment can have," he said. "Now customers can implement this in
the same timeframe as our core application."
The second pillar of
the upgrade is a social feedback widget called Cloud Monitor, which Vap
explains allows RightNow users to monitor online social networks,
beginning with Twitter and YouTube. Further add-ons for Facebook,
MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on, are planned.
With social networks
emerging as both powerful business platforms and as forums for
discussing brands, products and services, RightNow believes that the
ability to monitor and filter content intelligently will be vital,
especially in a downturn. In other words, if someone 'tweets' about a
business, either positively or negatively, then that company will be
able to search for, rank and respond to those comments. The same
applies to discussions on groups or other social forums.
In this
way, the agent desktop can be used as either a response or crisis
management tool and as a real-time consumer research platform. Over
time, more data will be gathered through the desktop, which will enable
companies to create audit trails of historic responses.
That
said, Vap acknowledges that common words or phrases appearing in the
names of brands, products or services could create a huge volume of
data that needs to be filtered tightly. Essentially, the tool is a
search and tag facility built on the APIs of each social network.
Nevertheless,
with more vertical or industry-specific social networks and forums
appearing all the time – such as information-sharing sites about
airlines and the travel industry, for example – the firm is witnessing
the emergence of some influential platforms for consumer action. Being
able to monitor and filter such discussions and respond to them will
inevitably become a valuable CRM tool.
So what next for RightNow?
"We do have a roadmap", said Vap. "We have two more releases this year,
in August and November. August will continue to fill out the Cloud
Monitor function and improve workflow. We're also doing a substantial
amount of work in marketing automation and feedback - a huge growth
area... closely related to the economy. Companies want to get really
close to their customers and find out what's going on."
Chris Middleton
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