RightNow Technologies, which built its business providing CRM services “as a service”, has agreed to buy HiveLive, whose software is a platform for social networking “as a service”. RightNow is reportedly going to pay $6 million in cash for the community-building specialist and the belief is that HiveLive’s software will be integrated into the next release of RightNow’s flagship service (due in November).

RightNow is a public company that is on target to generate a little less than $150 million in top line revenue. For the year ending December 2008, the company lost $7.2 million on $140 million in revenue. Management told reporters that the HiveLive acquisition would add another $4 million to its annual operating expenses. While the finances don’t make a lot of sense, the possible product refinements certainly do.

RightNow had been getting a lot of attention recently as companies look to services “in the cloud” to help them improve customer service. Many of the same companies are looking for an easy way to engage both customer service employees and customers in community activities. We first encountered the company when we were investigating different approaches to “homeshoring,” whereby companies turn to work-at-home agents to form virtual contact centers. Alpine Access, one of the innovators in the field deployed HiveLive as a network through which remote agents could interact and share ideas as part of a community.

Extending that community model to bolster “customer relationship” holds tremendous promise. Rather than just “listening” to the chatter (usually complaints) on microblogs and other community sites, this approach holds the promise to engage customer and sales personnel in discussions on the same platform. And integration into RightNow’s back-end means that interactions can be logged in some meaningful way to help track open items to make sure that the company is resolving issues on their customers’ behalf.

One of the things we’ve been learning as customer complaints go viral (like United Breaks Guitars), is that redress needs to be equally public. As my friend Doc Searls has famously said: “Markets are conversations.” So are interactions at the complaint line, but they are often one-sided. What’s needed, from the business point of view is a forum for public redress. We only see the complaints, never the resolution and recompense. When the community platform integrated with CRM in the cloud, the field is ripe for more, mutually beneficial customer care activity.

Categories: Articles