Last week, there was ample good news to go around as RightNow held its annual “Summit” for customers, partners and analysts. There was plenty of good news to go around, as the firm provided guidance on financial performance that reflects growth in revenues, profit and customer acquisition. It is riding a wave of success built on growth in its customer base in seven targeted verticals: High Tech, Public Sector, Telecom, Retail, Entertainment/Gaming, Financial Services, and Travel/Hospitality. It is finding success for its “cloud-based” approach as prospects grapple with tough decisions surrounding plans to upgrade both CRM and contact center infrastructure.

Most of all, RightNow is benefiting from world-wide perception that companies have to deliver pleasing and consistent customer experience across a multiplicity of channels. These prospects (and existing customers) are also confronting uncertainty as providers of core contact center technology (ACDs and IVRs as well as CRM systems) are going through their periodic “refresh” cycles, requiring (in some cases) the total “re-architecting” of customer care infrastructure.

In September 2009, RightNow acquired the online community-building specialist HiveLive. Looking at the company’s income statement at the time, I noted in , “While the finances don’t make a lot of sense, the possible product refinements certainly do.” Today, a little more than a year later, the product refinements have been made manifest and the financial make sense.

The stock price is up 40% this year as revenues grow and the company showed net income in each of the past four quarters. More importantly, the company has successfully assimilated HiveLive’s “social” aspects along with Voice and Web under its “customer experience” umbrella. It is now poised to add new direct salespeople and channel partners as it expands into new geographic territories and beefs up its “Voice” channel.

Speaking of that voice channel, RightNow is actively integrating its solutions with Interactive Intelligence, Avaya and Cisco, and has a long-standing relationship with Genesys (now integrated into the Enterprise Software Division of Alcatel-Lucent). Going forward, it supports an RC-like approach to solutions building by operating a “Cloud Services Portal”, which will enable the IT personnel at its customers to manage cloud-based resources as if they were on premises.

The portal already allows customers to avail themselves of an application designer as well as a library of API’s into Web services from partners and technology providers. In November the ability to build “Custom Objects”, will become generally available. This service, which has been in pilot mode with a number of customers, provides resources that enable developers to respond quickly to emerging, cross-channel problems by building solutions in RightNow’s database schema. Thus existing business processes and database management resources become the genetic material that can be spliced together to provide consistent experience across multiple channels.

Also at the ready, inside the RightNow Cloud and accessible through the portal are elements that support “security” in ways that are compliant with credit card processing (PCI), healthcare/pharma (HIPAA) and government implementations (NIST..); support of natural language search and sample code to support best practices is also baked in. Thus RightNow is in excellent position to leverage the experiences of its customer base, to further their ability to define, extend and expand upon what comprises a good customer experience.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Contact Center, CRM, Recombinant Communications