In a transaction valued at $34 million, RightNow has acquired the Dutch company Q-qo, which specializes in “natural language search.” In doing so, RightNow brings in-house, as well as into the RightNow CX Cloud, the ability to infer (they say “recognize”) the intent of a customer or prospect, by soliciting natural language input directly from a “search box” on the company Home Page.

RightNow customers, including the financial services giant ABN AMRO and KLM Airlines and others have already found measurable advantage to employing the Q-go solutions to reduce e-mail call volumes, generate sales leads, or simply improve the customer experience by shortening the time it takes to resolve customer issues.

The main components of Q-go’s product suite, which are called “interaction overlays,” include:

Question Matching which uses pattern matching to recognize a customer’s intent based on entries in an existing website search box

Virtual Assistant which is an automated ‘bot that engages Web visitors in a “personal, natural conversation interaction”

Web Form Assistant automatically populates Web-based forms based on previously captured (forms based) visitor information

Contextual Online Offers matches visitors with real-time, relevant offers based on the context of a page or the user’s imputed intent.

The RightNow CX cloud will be further enhanced by resources that recognize the language that a visitor or caller is using; that glean similar “intent” from slightly different phrases (E.g. “Open an account” is the same as “Start an account.”; and that take into account jargon or phrases that are unique to a specific industry.

RightNow believes that the Q-go products and services will add $8 million to the company’s revenue in FY 2011.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, RightNow, CRM, Recombinant Communications, Enhanced Search