The shadow of Dave Carroll hangs long over RightNow. You've probably seen Dave, even if the name doesn't immediately ring a bell. He doesn't work for RightNow or any other CRM firm, but he's become something of a customer management icon in recent times.
Carroll is the country and western singer who's guitar was damaged by United Airlines baggage handlers and who published a song about it on YouTube. The resulting traffic to view it was accompanied by the loss of millions of dollars from the airline's share price.
But his story doesn't end there. Last week Carroll was invited by RightNow to appear at the firm's US user conference and the only airline that he could take to the venue was...er, United – and of course they proceeded to lose his luggage! So for three days Carroll wandered around the RightNow event minus his luggage and presumably working on his follow-up YouTube single...
“Dave is the embodiment of consumer empowerment,” argued Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow as he opened the firm's European user event in Brighton this week. “None of what happened with Dave would have been possible without social networking. Five years ago if some musician had had his guitar damaged, he'd have had no recourse. If he was a lawyer, he could have sued. But he's a musician, so he wrote a song. Five million YouTube viewers later and it's tough luck United!”
All about experience
Gianforte argues that more and more companies are becoming savvy about the need to focus more on the customer experience and this in turn is leading to more senior level conversations with vendors such as RightNow. “I am meeting with more and more C-level executives where it used to be customer service executives. Now it's the COO or the CIO or the CEO,” he said. “There is a recognition that customer experience is just crucial and a growing realisation that a strategy of trying to 'manage' customers is a failed one. Customers never wanted to be managed in the first place, they wanted to be empowered. That's what's happening now.
“As RightNow, our mission is to rid the world of bad customer experiences,” he went on. “Consumers now have a megaphone and with the same voice they can advocate or they can tear you down. We did some research recently that found that the number one reason that consumers say they will recommend your brand is outstanding service, not the product or the pricing, but the service. Consumers are no longer what we used to understand as consumers. Whether in B2B or B2C markets, you have consumers.”
So the drivers are there, but with the ongoing economic downturn are they really the priorities? “The focus is still on cost reduction,” admitted Gianforte. “Most of our engagements start as pilots. It's still very hard for execs to go to senior management and say that they think they're going to get a result like this and get it backed. One of the benefits of operating in a SaaS model is that people can try it in production and see the benefits. They don't have to go to senior management with a PowerPoint slide.”
As to the current economic prospects, Gianforte can see signs of life, but reckons that the world has changed. “In the first quarter, we just saw customers go under their desks and get into a foetal position,” he explained. “There were customers that we had been doing business with for years where suddenty the VPs couldn't sign purchase orders any more. It had to go higher up the company, there had to be one more board of directors meeting to make the decision. We saw a slow down in bookings as we worked out what the new normal was in getting POs signed off.”
Does he think that this new world order is here to stay even when the economy lightens up. “The pendulum has swung in one direction, it will swing back,” he said. “When we return to a period of prosperity then spending controls will ease up and it will be easier to get things approved. Then we'll hit a period of trouble again and it will swing back. It's always been the same.”
Getting sociable
A big focus for RightNow is the social CRM space, an area that is might be assumed many senior execs still need some convincing about. After all, most of them will have been sold the universal panacea of packaged CRM before, some of them several times, so is now the right time to go to them and tell them that they need to buy into social networking as well? “You certainly can't and shouldn't just do social for social's sake,” agreed Gianforte. “You need to focus on the business goals and then you weave the social aspects through those goals. There are questions that need to be asked. Does a company have a commitment to change a particular situation? Senior management has to accept that there is an issue and that they want to do something about it.
“You need to prioritise. If you're in charge of customer care for a utility firm and it takes you three days to respond to emails from your customers, then you don't need to be doing social CRM now, you need to fix your email response times! Once you reach a reasonable level of service, then you can use social technologies to become exceptional. Even if you have a 95% customer satisfaction rating, that still means you're upsetting 5% of your customers.”
Gianforte is vexed by the Social CRM claims of some of his competitors, most notably Salesforce.com with its Service Cloud 2.0 announcement. “I don't want to attack them but they have come into our backyard with this and their version of the truth just does not line up with reality,” he said. “The difference between us and Salesforce is we have products that ship. You can’t demo a press release. They bought InStranet a year and a half ago, but they have no knowledge base, no email management, no chat, no feedback management and no social solution. Other than that it’s a great solution!
"They say that they have 8000 Service Cloud customers – well, we can't find them! There was a recent bid with an electronics firm and Salesforce.com produced two references. One was MySpace. MySpace stood up at our conference in the US last week and keynoted on how happy they were with our technology! We work very hard on the integrity of our relationships with our customers and Salesforce.com comes along and blatantly says these things and that impinges on the whole industry. Well, it pisses me off.”
It's clear that he's genuinely riled and ready to pick a fight with the claims of other firms. Quite how they react to this remains to be seen. But they should perhaps take note when weighing up their chances: this is a CEO who takes 7am dips in the sea off Brighton Pier in November!
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