Third Idea Consulting

[Disclosure: RightNow flew me out to its annual summit and paid for my meals and lodging. The following represents my informed opinion, provided without request by the organization or anybody else.]

There are a few really huge names in CRM, but sometimes it’s the not-quite-as-huge names you need to look out for. While it would be disingenuous to suggest RightNow Technologies is anything other than big, the company is often overshadowed in the media by certain others (I’m thinking of Salesforce.com) that are more adept at controlling the conversation. I’d like to evaluate the offerings and the messaging of RightNow, divorced as much as possible from comparison to its rival.

I’d really like to do that, but I’ve got to be honest—I’d probably have to give up the attempt at some point. While RightNow doesn’t define itself in terms of Salesforce.com, and its messaging places Salesforce as one of many competitors depending on the specifics of the engagement, Marc Benioff’s billion-dollar-plus concern is the first name most people think of when considering CRM in the cloud, socially enabled or otherwise. If there’s any company to compare to RightNow, it’s that one.

If time weren’t a factor, I’d delay this post until after Dreamforce—Salesforce.com’s annual convention—early this December, and put the two companies head-to-head the way I did with Sage and Nimble. Waiting six weeks or more isn’t a great plan either, and it would let my fresh thoughts go to waste in the interim. I want to be fair to both companies, so here’s my plan: I will tell you about RightNow as planned, and revisit the topic after Dreamforce to provide updated insight on Salesforce.com. Both teams get a turn at bat, and players on either one are welcomed to comment and argue.

RightNow comes from a contact center background, and it shows in its approach to CRM. The message is about customer experience as enabled by CRM; CEO Greg Gianforte says the company’s mission is “to rid the world of bad experiences.” He doesn’t shy away from the CRM moniker, though, as many other vendors have done. Customers spend most of their lifecycle in the hands of customer service (what a surprise!), so it seems natural to base a CRM effort there. I respect this approach, though the history of CRM is sales force automation (SFA), something that’s clearly in Salesforce.com’s DNA. If businesses exist to sell products and services to customers, SFA is what you want. If businesses exist to serve customers, then you start in the contact center with customer service and support.

I need to check my dates and figures to be sure, but I think Salesforce.com was the first company, at least in this group of two, to make social media part of its message. The AppExchange is a community-driven marketplace, there are Salesforce integrations with social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and much of the newer functionality of Salesforce CRM uses a social networking model for internal communications. RightNow followed soon after with CX Suite, which integrates social media with everyday customer-facing processes. The companies have similar capabilities if you pick the right modules and options, with RightNow providing more reporting depth but Salesforce having the edge in dashboard presentation.

That said, the two companies have a very different approach to integrating social CRM. Salesforce has, for a long time now, presented itself as a toolbox or model kit. If you want live integration with your customers on Facebook, there’s a module for that. Want to rank and discuss enterprise content? You can do it. And if it isn’t available as a core piece of Salesforce CRM, you can get it on the AppExchange. RightNow CX Suite is also a toolkit, but it assumes you want to get close to your customers from the outset. Where Salesforce says, “You can do this if you want,” RightNow asks “Why aren’t you doing this already?”

One of the places the difference between RightNow and many of its competitors is clear is their customers. Now, everybody has great customer success stories—if you can’t get that in the CRM industry, you won’t last long—but RightNow’s feel different, in a good way.

With Salesforce.com, and every other vendor for the most part, the customers we get to interview feel like they’ve been prepared. They all have bullet points to hit, and specific ROI results they want to mention. (Note: When a writer is planning a case study, these things are important, so it’s not like I dislike specifics. But in a general purpose interview, it’s not as necessary and can even be distracting.) In Salesforce.com’s case, it’s important to have this kind of preparation, as that company tends to announce a lot of new features and options multiple times before they’re generally available, and then there will be follow-up press releases to remind us that module X has been out for a while. If Salesforce doesn’t vet its reference customers, there’s a fair chance the interview will go off the rails because we’re talking about different things.

RigtNow’s customers aren’t prepped much, if at all, because RightNow doesn’t have a never-ending list of preannouncements. I spoke with two great RightNow customers at the recent summit, Kim Rundleof Organic Valley and Rich Brecht of J&P Cycles. In both cases, the conversation was as natural as if we’d just met at a networking event and decided to talk about CRM. Well, it felt kind of like that, but with way more enthusiasm. This is how it is whenever I talk to a RightNow customer; I had an informal chat over lunch with Boyd Beasley of Electronic Arts, and it was a very similar experience. Each representative had things they liked, frictions with some stakeholders, and hopes and plans for what to do with their RightNow system in the future, but it all felt natural.

This difference in RightNow’s and Salesforce.com’s approach to customers is indicative of deeper differences in how the two companies deal with messaging. I’m going to come right out and say that Salesforce.com controls the conversation when it comes to SaaS CRM. They announce constantly, keeping their initiatives fresh in our minds. The press releases are usually worded dynamically, so you won’t dismiss them right after you start reading. And Salesforce.com is at the stag where each announcement is for a discrete element of the overall solution, so you know what you’re getting.

By contrast, RightNow is very low-key about its announcements. Typically, there’s an announcement that something is in development, and the next time you hear about it is the GA press release. Whatever the new item is, it’s always presented as an update to the existing RightNow suite, since users of RightNow seem more likely to use the whole thing than the typical Salesforce mix-and-match approach. RightNow also has terrible luck with timing, because its announcements are usually either preceded or followed immediately by a piece from another vendor. It’s usually Salesforce, so I think that’s a matter of strategy and a loud voice combining to good effect. This means that the RightNow story—both the specific product-related one and the “company narrative”—can become lost if the journalist or analyst doesn’t stay focused on it. I’ve found it difficult to do, and I’m aware of the issue; others who aren’t as clued in have little hope.

That’s it for Part One. I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with Salesforce.com’s side of the story this December.

It has been a busy couple of weeks for followers of CRM, Social CRM, and all that goes along with it. I haven’t got my head around all of it yet, but I’ll provide a handy link-dump at the end of this post to give you some starting points. It’s good to know that even when there’s more happening than I can reasonably cover, I can always link to my friends.

I’ve just returned from BPT Partners‘ Social CRM Summit (search the hashtag #scrmsummit to see some of what went on) where I had a great time refreshing and expanding my skills. Paul Greenberg—friend, mentor, mensch—was at the helm as usual, and it never ceases to amaze me that he always has something new to say on the topic of social CRM.

I don’t want to say too much about the specifics, since this is professional development and I need to be able to sell the result of what I’ve learned instead of giving it away, but there was a lot of emphasis on usable business strategy. A few years ago, social media strategy for business amounted to, “Get involved now, because this is gonna be huge.” It was good advice in 2006, and it’s still good, but we’ve had a lot of time to refine our techniques since then. With the addition of social media monitoring and analytics, it’s possible to make a really solid business case for SCRM adoption.

Catching up with friends and meeting new ones is always a benefit at events like this. Brent Leary even showed up—the trip from his neck of the woods to ours wasn’t trivial, even if it was in the same state—to say hi and let me talk smack about his alleged free throw skills. There was an escalation, and something tells me we (along with Mike Boysen, Mitch Lieberman, and others) will be putting it on the line to shoot from the line in the near future for bragging rights. I don’t care how bad I do, since basketball is my anti-sport, but as long as I outscore Brent I’ll be happy.

A few days before heading down to Atlanta (actually Kennesaw, which is near Atlanta in the same way that Northampton is near London), RightNow Technologies held a launch event here in New York for RightNow CX. I provided a lot of my thoughts on the company’s new social platform in October, but I want to reiterate that this looks really good. While history may show that CRM got the most traction among sales professionals, today’s customer-driven social CRM has a natural starting point in customer service and support. RightNow, with its contact center pedigree, is definitely one to watch here They’ve got some great customers, including CBS Interactive, Match.com, MySpace, and Aircell (the gogoinflight people), that show off what a natural fit SCRM is when grown in contact center soil.

A few days prior to that, I took a call with Clare Dorrian of Sword Ciboodle to discuss the company’s direction and new offerings. Ciboodle is more of a traditional CRM vendor (which is fine), serving larger enterprises. It also has strength in the contact center—I love the look of Ciboodle One, its new unified agent desktop—and is further building out its work flow and Web self service capabilities to capitalize on that. I just got hold of some of Ciboodle’s customer case studies, so that should give me some fun reading over Memorial Day weekend. (That’s not as sarcastic as it sounds; I have genuine interest in some concrete examples of how the company is helping businesses.)

And now the link dump. Actually, it’s more of a shout-out to two of my friends, but since they write so much and so well, it can serve both purposes.

Denis Pombriant (previously mentioned here) has been extra-prolific with his blogging lately, with a lot of coverage from Sage Insights among other things. Wish I could’ve been there, but this is the next best thing. See all of his May content here.

Ray Wang, now of Altimeter Group, got to see what was up at SAPPHIRE 2010, the big annual SAP conference that I would also have loved to attend. He’s also been banging out a lot of news coverage, especially where acquisitions are concerned (SAP and Sybase, IBM and Sterling Commerce, Lithium and ScoutLabs, Attensity and Biz360). See his blog here.

I’ve just spent (and am still spending) a busy and informative demi-week at the RightNow Summit in lovely Colorado Springs, and I’m glad I came. Greg Gianforte and company are doing some very smart things.I’ve dinged RightNow in the past for sometimes lacking in effective media/analyst outreach, but that appears to no longer be the case, and the timing is excellent.

The reason for my enthusiasm is that RightNow’s message of customer experience is now a product and a strategy, CX. The social CRM and SaaS stars are finally in alignment, and the RightNow CX customer experience suite that Greg G. announced on Tuesday was born under those auspices. My tweets from that morning’s general session will give you some idea of what RightNow CX is all about, but I’ll summarize it here in a more coherent fashion. I’ve got to rely on text because I’m having trouble getting slides to work, but bullet lists are clear enough.

From the ground up, there are five main components of RightNow CX, each containing part of the package. RightNow CX Platform is the technology that supports the traditional CRM functions of RightNow Engage, which in turn supports the three customer experience components (Web Experience, Social Experience, and Contact Center Experience). Thus,

RightNow CX Platform

• Knowledge management
• Integration
• Mission-critical SaaS (more about this later)

RightNow Engage

• Marketing
• Voice of the Customer
• Sales
• Analytics

RightNow Web Experience

• Customer Portal (including Web self-service and mobile)
• Chat and Co-Browse
• Email Management
• Web Experience Design

RightNow Social Experience

• Support communities
• Innovation communities
• Cloud monitoring
• Social experience design

RightNow Contact Center Experience

• Phone and multichannel interaction management
• Case management
• Voice automation
• Contact center experience design (including desktop workflow, agent scripting, and contextual workspaces)

Mission-critical SaaS includes something the company is calling Invisible Updates, with elimination of downtime as the goal. The concept appears similar to Salesforce.com’s 5-minute upgrades, but RightNow is aiming for true seamlessness. It also prides itself on having always provided service level agreements with teeth—the company cuts checks for its customers when downtime exceeds what’s spelled out in the SLA. It’ll be fun to see how the two rivals stack up in this matter.

A lot of the new customer experience functionality, especially the knowledge base and Social Experience parts, are the fruit of RightNow’s acquisition of HiveLive in September of this year, followed by what must be the fastest assimilation of technology since Star Trek introduced the Borg. A six-week turnaround from acquisition to deployment was unheard of before this, as far as I know.

RightNow takes the position that customer experience is everything, and is making “ridding the world of bad experiences” its goal. The path to achieving this leads through the contact center, and recognizes the power of the customer to make or break a business no matter how good the products might be. Numbers from the 2009 Customer Experience Impact Report (commissioned by RightNow from Harris Interactive) back this up:

• 86% of consumers will never go back to a company after a bad customer experience
• 60% will always or often pay more for a better customer experience (up from 58% in 2008)
• 82% who had a bad customer experience told others about it (up from 67% in 2006)
• 53% will recommend a company to someone else because they provide outstanding service

To illustrate the potential impact of one bad experience, we were treated to one more showing of the “United Breaks Guitars” video—but with a twist, because Dave Carroll (the creator) took the stage partway through to finish out the song and give us a first-hand account of his experiences. As he finished up, he revealed what I’d call PR gold for him and RightNow: Carroll’s only option for getting to the conference was to fly United, and the airline lost his luggage. If you listen carefully, you can hear United’s market capitalization dropping even further than the $180 million attributed to the initial incident.

If RightNow CX Platform is as good as it looks, and the company is true to its word, 2010 could very well be RightNow’s year. Every single one of Greg G’s customer visits in the past three to four months (he’s done more than 300 customer visits in the past 18 months) has had social CRM as a focus—driven by the customers, pulling RightNow into the conversation. That’s encouraging to me, since I’d hate to have established a practice in a field nobody cares about.

You’ll also be glad to know that I am now officially Huge On Twitter, at least as far as the PR team from Horn Group and RightNow Technology is concerned. I hope to continue living up to the accolade.

Hey folks: I’m at a conference with functioning WiFi! It’s RightNow Summit ‘09, and we’re just a few minutes away from the opening address. Look for my live updates on Twitter, and a full account of the news later today. Anything I don’t get, you should be able to learn from Christopher Musico of CRM magazine, Esteban Kolsky, or Forrester Research’s Dr. Natalie Petouhoff.

The busy part has ended for the moment. Here’s what you missed—or got from somebody else, I don’t mind. For those of you who might criticize me for cramming multiple updates into one post, too bad. I want to get these things off my plate, and they’re conceptually related.

1. Salesforce.com announced updates to Service Cloud, the award-winning customer service component for its SaaS business computing environment. It’s now called Service Cloud 2, based on changes to the way it all works as the integration with InStranet has progressed. Salesforce.com fans will be glad to know that the Twitter integration is available now for free download, and tentative dates have been attached to the other two components (the knowledge base and the crowdsourced customer service).

I will tell you it’s looking very good, and I stand by my assessment of Service Cloud’s potential in the first linked article. One of the key concepts Service Cloud is built on is that a great many customers turn to the Internet for help before (or instead of) asking the vendor, and building customer service around this is going to be big for Salesforce.com. The announcement, however, is very similar to what we saw in January—if there’s one thing I can regularly ding that company for, it’s the issuance of multiple press releases for what is essentially the same news. It’s more a journalistic quibble than a complaint about their business practices—the fact remains that Salesforce.com has become a billion-dollar concern by making sure nobody forgets what they’re up to.

2. RightNow signed an agreement to acquire HiveLive, the social networking platform vendor. I’ve met and spoken with HiveLive before (though not recently enough to have had any inkling of the buyout), and I’ve got to say this is potentially an excellent move by RightNow. Greg Gianforte’s Bozeman, MT-based RightNow has always been very strong in the customer service end of CRM, and the move to community-based help environments impacts that. HiveLive’s platform is highly customizable and capable, so if all goes well RightNow will have just what it needs to make itself the go-to provider of SaaS customer service, Web self-service, and e-commerce apps.

There are a number of ifs, of course. Buying technology isn’t the same as integrating it; I’m still waiting for the Salesnet acquisition from 2006 to bear visible fruit. And I can’t say for certain where the deal came from or where it’s going, because—unlike rival Salesforce.com—RightNow tends to be very closed-mouthed about its activities, and the company doesn’t make nearly enough regular noise for its own good. (This time it’s understandable though, because certain messages need to be held until the markets close.)

Caveats aside, I think it’s a good move. I am imagining the combined product and it’s awesome. Here’s hoping there’s something to see very soon, at least by the RightNow Summit this October.

[UPDATE 9/15/2009, noonish] Regardless of what I think about RightNow having slipped a bit in the industry’s perception, the company is still doing right by its customers; Three of its implementations won Gartner/1to1 enterprise CRM awards today. Congratulations to RightNow, iRobot, Distance Minnesota, and National Cable Networks. See the release here.

3. I spent Wednesday afternoon at the live component of an Acxiom Webinar, which you can view here. David Daniels of Forrester Research was the leadoff speaker, giving a great talk about the relevancy of the messages and channels businesses use to engage customers. He was followed by Chriss Marriott, Acxiom’s global managing director and vice president, who presented his ideas on “Winning Elections in the Marketing Democracy,” a clever way of discussing the use of social CRM for marketing. It was a pretty low-key session, but informative and even inspiring. If you need a primer on the ROI of social media in marketing, you could do worse than watch the recording. David and Chris are both very engaging speakers, and the day provided me some new ideas on how to open discussions.

So it’s shaping up to be a busy, if short, week. While I was busy absorbing and writing about the Oracle-InQuira announcement you read about yesterday, I nearly missed an announcement from Salesforce.com. (You can see the details of that news here, including a few of my comments on it.) And while I was tracking that down, RightNow Technologies snuck in a little bit of news of their own, to wit the acquisition of HiveLive.

I’d give you the lowdown on the RNOW news, but in addition to getting a handle on that, I need to prep for a social media marketing event here in New York hosted by Axciom.

Oy.

I’ll provide a summary after the crazy has settled to an acceptable level. Salesforce news = cool, RNOW news = smart (I think), Axciom event = informative (probably).

It might not have been an “eventful” period since my last entry, but there are definitely a lot of things going on in the social media world—enough that I’ve been having some trouble narrowing down my thoughts to one topic. As such, I’ll touch on a number of different things, part-linkdump, part commentary.

More social media guidelines. I’m glad to see that Intel isn’t the only big company getting serious enough about social media engagement to codify its approach (see my previous post here). A recent post on FastForward Blog notes similar efforts by IBM, Sun, and RightNow. Thing 1: The FastForward writer says he was told RightNow’s guidelines were partly shaped by what Intel, IBM, and Sun had set down. Does this mean there’s already a second (or third, or 12th) generation of such corporate policies floating around for the public to see? I hope so. Thing 2: Oracle acquired Sun in April, after failing to reach terms with IBM. I wonder how the acquisition will affect Sun’s social policy, or for that matter Oracle’s.

A man and his brand. Last month (sorry, didn’t see it until a few days ago) filmmaker/author/Jersey boy Kevin Smith did some heavy Q&A for readers of Decider before a live appearance. You can read it here. (NSFW if you’re not allowed to read profanity, or if a guy who answers questions while smoked up is against company policy. I pity those who fit this description.) Say what you want about Kevin Smith (I dig him), this is a guy who really understands himself, his audience, and his industry. He understands it better than major studios who think viral marketing can be made to order and posted to the MySpace and put into the YouTubes. This is a successful creator who knows where he’s from, and what created his fan following, and stays in touch with it without pandering to it. His answer to the third question sums it up well:

Many celebrities seem to guard every shed of privacy they can get their hands on, yet you have always been a very accessible public figure. With a SModcast, a blog, your Evenings With series, and a Twitter, your life seems to be an open book. What drives you to let people into your life in such an intimate way?

I don’t know any other way to be, really. Once media was created that allowed a dialogue to open between filmmakers and audience, there was no way I couldn’t embrace it. This is a communications medium, film. We do this to get a reaction and hear what people have to say about our work. It’s enormously flattering when someone (or lots of someones) are interested in you enough as an artist to wanna know about your life and opinions beyond the actual work that brought you to their attention in the first place. [...]

Kevin Smith is his own successful brand, and he got that way by never trying to be a brand, or be anything other than what he is: a comic-book fan, a regular guy, a sarcastic observer of what he grew up around. I’m not saying that a manufacturer of backed abrasives can have the same ease in relating to its customers, but it’s an ideal to consider whenever social CRM is on the table.

A duel of trust. As our online relationships become broader and more diffuse, we’re starting to ask who we can trust. It’s not surprising that surveys are being conducted on just that topic, nor is it surprising that different sources are getting different answers. The Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey (via Adweek) says trust of consumer reviews and opinions—other than those of personally-known individuals—is at 70 percent. The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, however, says there is “strong to complete distrust” of anonymous consumer reviews, and only about 33 percent trust of online friends’ recommendations. That’s an awfully wide chasm to bridge. To be fair, though, in the Razorfish report 86 percent of respondents say that “whom they trust is dependent on the type of product.” I don’t imagine a war between these opposing points of view, but trust is an important issue that we need to make sure stays current. I’d say it’s more important to figure out what creates trust than to identify its strongest locii, but that route opens the possibility of manipulating trust—something businesses are often all too willing to try. See this New York Times column by Bob Herbert for an idea of what I mean.

Update 1: Shortly after writing this, I came across the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer. (PDF link.) It’s a bit more general than the two above, but still quite valuable. Thanks to Prem Kumar Aparanji (@prem_k) and Josh Weinberger (@kitson) for the tip.

Update 2: Also shortly after writing this, I realized I’d left out my take on the United Airlines broken guitar saga. I’ll save that for my next post.

That’s all for now. Keep an ear open for the next podcast of Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary as the CRM Playaz. It’s coming soon, and these two are always on point and entertaining. No link yet, but Paul’s pretty reliable about putting linkage on his ZDNet blog.