RightNow Technologies is continuing its social media crusade by enhancing its software-as-a-service-based offerings to make it easier for business-to-consumer companies to support, listen and respond to their customers.
The vendor first leapt into the fray in May last year when it launched a so-called Cloud Monitor service to enable customers to analyse user trends and opinions by tracking external conversations about products, services and brands on a range of social networking sites.
It subsequently purchased online research community HiveLive for $6 million in September and is using its online communities, intended to boost customer support, engagement and loyalty, as the basis of its current social media platform.
David Vap, the vendor’s chief solutions officer, said that such technology was having a big impact on the CRM world and that sales in the space were on the up – social media generated more revenues for the firm during the end of last quarter than it had for the entire year.
But he added that, while it was expected to generate a "substantial portion" of the firm’s turnover over the year ahead, he did not anticipate such offerings overtaking sales of its core contact centre and online customer self-service products in the foreseeable future.
Social experience
The enhancements, meanwhile, fall into all three of the areas of RightNow’s ‘Social Experience’ offering – its ‘support community’ piece, the ‘innovation community’ element and its ‘social experience designer’ administration tools.
The first category includes the supplier’s traditional knowledgebase offering and forums, while the second enables ideation. This means that customers are provided with an area to post feedback and ideas about products and services so that organisations can use such information to enhance traditional product management techniques.
On the support side of the equation, the vendor has upgraded its Cloud Monitor service.
The offering now supports RSS on top of existing Twitter and YouTube feeds and enables users to monitor conversations based on key words so that they can respond appropriately with a single click of their mouse. It also enables them to filter search results on YouTube and Twitter using any one of 33 languages.
On the community side, however, call centre agents can now see members’ social networking profiles from their desktop in order to understand an individual’s view of their brand, that individual’s reputation within the community and the like.
Finally, RightNow has enhanced its administration tools to enable social media users to comment on, add to or rate answers to frequently asked questions held in customers’ knowledgebases. Community posts can also be embedded into the knowledgebase and users can chose to broadcast it more widely on other social media sites or portals using new AddThis tools.
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