With 500 million registered users, Facebook looms as the most powerful leverage point for companies that seek to build a social graph among customers, prospects and (er) fans. RightNow is one of a handful of enterprise infrastructure providers that are actively orchestrating how existing contact center personnel (the people trained to carry out customer support primarily over the phone) can be efficiently brought into conversations that start out as comments, compliments or complaints on Facebook.

Today RightNow “unveiled” RightNow CX for Facebook, a product that will be generally available in November. It comes as a response to requests from customers and end-users alike for an easy mechanism to mash-up formal support capabilities into a company’s presence on Facebook. The product is a Facebook App that, when installed, creates a “Support” tab on a company’s wall. When visitors (be they customers or prospects) click on the tab, they can avail themselves of a number of options, including self-service, “crowd service”, or live agent assistance, all based on RightNow’s core CX platform.

The product is unique in its tight integration of a presence on Facebook with resources commonly associated with the contact center, including access to the knowledge base and contact records that inform agents and customer service reps. Agents can respond directly to the wall postings or send messages directly on Facebook (Webchat is expected to be supported with formal release in November). They can also use the RightNow’s infrastructure to escalate an issue and attach high-priority to particularly “hot” issues.

We’re still in the early days of a long march to better engagement between firms, their customers and their prospects. For both cultural and technological reasons, companies customarily take baby steps toward better “listening” and customer engagement. By packaging lots of features and functions behind an “app” that ostensibly just adds a “Support” tab to the company wall, RighNow makes this small step for an enterprise into a great stride toward better customer engagement.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, RightNow, Facebook, Social CRM, Mashups