RIGHTNOW 8 SERVICE
Rich and Flexible Customer-Self-Service Capabilities for Organizations of All Sizes
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

NETTING IT OUT

Customer self-service products let you deliver a customer experience that can help your customers use the World Wide Web to find answers to questions about your products and services and to help customers diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems that they’re having with your products and services.

RightNow 8 CRM, introduced in February 2007, is a suite of six applications offered through Software as a Service licenses. You’ll use one of those applications—RightNow Service—to implement a Web-based customer self-service system, and you’ll use another—RightNow Analytics—to analyze and refine it. RightNow introduced RightNow Web 1.0, the predecessor of RightNow Service, in 1997. To date, 1,800 customer accounts have implemented one or more RightNow CRM application. 90 percent of them have implemented RightNow Service.

On the PSGroup Report Card for Customer Self-Service, RightNow 8 Service exceeds requirements for search, case/incident management, escalation to assisted-service, analytic functionality, product viability, and company viability. It needs improvement in architecture.

RightNow and RightNow CRM have established an excellent reputation for fast implementations of rich functionality within small and mid-sized organizations. The reputation is well-deserved. However, RightNow Service offers capabilities for customer self-service that are rich and flexible enough to be considered by organizations of all sizes. We recommend its consideration for your self-service implementation.

CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE

Customers Want to Help Themselves

Customers like to and want to help themselves. Patty Seybold first pointed this out in 1998 in her landmark book, Customers.com, where she stated,

“Your customers want more than a good Web site. They want a seamless web of interactive applications that will let them help themselves to information, perform transactions, check on the status of things, make inquiries, and get information that’s relevant to their particular situation. And, when appropriate, they want a person integrated into the process.”

Nine years later, Patty remains on point. Her concept for customer self-service is still today exactly what your customers want to do. For customer self-service, we focus on activities that enable customers to help themselves to answer the questions that they have about your products and services, and to help them diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems that they’re having with your products and services in their installation/deployment and use of your products and services.

A Subset Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service

Customer self-service is a subset of what we call cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. What we mean is that:

• Customers want your help on every channel through which they interact with you—the Web and email for self-service, your contact center, stores, and your field service force for assisted service.
• Customers want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, through every interaction and iteration within the lifecycle phases of plan, explore, select, buy, use, maintain, and re-new.

Cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service is an absolute essential for strong and profitable customer relationships. However, in practice, we’ve found that delivering a customer service experience with the breadth and depth to support every channel and the entire lifecycle of your customer relation-ships is quite difficult because your organization and budgets are oriented to business functions and/or products, not customer experience. It’s also difficult because no single product or product suite is designed to address the spectrum of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle requirements.

The most practical approach to creating and delivering cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service is to do so incrementally by individual channels or related groups of channels and for individual or related lifecycle phases. A key ingredient to success is customer self-service—helping your customers use the World Wide Web to find answers to questions about your products and services, and to help customers diagnose, isolate, and resolve problems that they’re having with your products and services.

Evaluating Customer Self-Service Products and Services

Through our work with you, our work understanding software solutions, and our ongoing customer-centric analyses, we’ve identified the requirements for customer self-service products and created a framework that will help you evaluate how well products address those requirements[1].  Like all of our product evaluation frameworks, this one delivers the following significant benefits:

• It shortens your time-to-market.
• It saves time and reduces your costs in product evaluation, comparison, and selection.
• It reduces your risks in product evaluation, comparison, and selection.

The framework enables you to make apples-to-apples comparisons on the most important product evaluation factors. Then our product evaluations against the framework speed and simplify your work even more.

The framework for customer self-service has five top-level evaluation criteria and sets of sub-criteria for each top-level criterion. We show the criteria and their factors in Illustration 1. These are the top-level evaluation criteria:

• Operational functionality for customer self-service

• Analytic functionality for customer self-service

• Architecture

• Product viability

• Company viability

In this report, we evaluate RightNow 8 Service against that framework.

Customer Self-Service Evaluation Framework

© 2007 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.

Illustration 1. This illustration shows the evaluation criteria of the customer self-service evaluation framework.

This report continues…

To read the full report: http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=838.

1) See “Framework for Evaluating Customer Self-Service Products and Services: How to Evaluate Service Solutions That Deliver a Great End-to-End Customer Experience,”June 8, 2006, http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=722.