RightNow - This company is a company that’s there and yet…almost there and have been that way for several years. I think 2009 is their breakout year if certain initiatives they’ve undertaken fall into place and they make sure that they manage their positioning around these initiatives well. They have been long established as the go-to guys for on demand customer service for quite some time. In fact, two months ago, Gartner positioned them as leaders in the E-Services Magic Quadrant, rightfully so. Unlike many of their on demand brethren, with perhaps the exception of Aplicor, they’ve penetrated the public sector deeply, an incredibly smart move. They’ve spent a good deal of time trying to position themselves and direct and redirect strategy. Sometimes too much and with odd glitches. For example, they bought the highly functional SalesNet in 2006 for $9 million (see this Phil Wainewright ZDNET 2006 entry for some solid analysis of the deal) and then tried to call it something that “improved the customer experience.” Not one of their better moves. Yet, they’ve moved to keep a focus, one better directed on customer experience as a core requirement of customer service. More recently, they’ve wisely begun to integrate some social CRM thinking and a bit of the functionality into their offering. For example, they have a tight partnership with Lithium since 2006 - which gives them the capability to provide threaded discussions inside of company-produced forums and communities. No longer just operational, they are beginning to integrate some quasi-social functionality - especially with the August 08 release of their on demand service (Their November 08 release is more geared to large scale contact center improvements and consolidated services). They have a pro-active chat function that tracks customer activity and when a pre-determined threshold is reached, a chat window pops up for the customer’s use if they so choose - based on the conditions of the activity. Additionally, they have a co-browsing function that pretty much sounds like GotoMyPC for tech folks. They added a single sign on customer portal that is primarily built around creating highly personalized services offerings that can be sculpted by the user themselves. The access is classic single sign-on. All in all, quasi-social and a great start. But Its only a start. But with CEO Greg Gianforte, who knows how to operate lean and VERY smart in lean times at the helm, RightNow could be a strong established up and coming (odd juxtaposition there, eh wot?) leader this coming year but like NetSuite need another year to mount up.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
