RightNow Technologies has released a new version of its on-demand CRM platform.
The two main upgrades to the system are a contextual agent workspace and feedback topic monitoring.
With the newly designed workspace, agents should be able to give more personalized and relevant responses to consumers. The desktops will format themselves in response to the context of the interaction, highlighting some fields and closing others to spell out a specific course of action for the agent.
“We focus on one-two punch implementation,” said David Vap, VP of product management for RightNow. “We often look to provide the ability for the customer to self-serve across channels. Often, though, you can’t self-serve and you need to be escalated to an agent.”
Vap named two benefits to the upgraded desktop: a better customer experience and training cost reduction.
“What we’ve done in this release is add capabilities to ensure that, once you do get on the phone with a human, the program makes sure the agent has the information necessary to help solve your problem,” he continued. “The primary feature we’ve done this with is the contextual workspace.”
Topic monitoring works with RightNow’s customer feedback capabilities to organize and analyze “write-in” comments. Common topics and keywords are now automatically clustered by the software. This capability, combined with previously-released emotion detection features, should allow agents to better understand customers’ sentiments and experiences.
Unlike the automated desktop, which was offered in response to customer demand, topic monitoring was driven by R&D at RightNow. Vap noted that the aggregated information from customer surveys could be used to drive future marketing tools and product initiatives.
“A lot of customers will do a quick survey right at the end of a service incident, and that’s almost a real-time response,” said Vap. “To close that loop quickly is important, and it’s the kind of information you don’t get on a ‘rate us one to five’ sort of survey.”
RightNow, headquartered in Bozeman, MT, provides CRM services and software to 1,800 organizations worldwide, including Black & Decker and Ubisoft. A majority of RightNow’s clients are large mid-market organizations or departments of large enterprises, such as Cisco’s LinkSys. Consumer electronics, telecommunications and sectors that rely on complex customer relations, like school-to-student recruiting, are major users of RightNow’s platform.
