Oracle RightNow CX is leader in Customer Service Solutions

Forrester published the 2014 Forrester Wave for “Customer Service Solutions” for Enterprise organisations and for Small and Midsize organisations. The market research company chose the most significant solutions and researched, analysed, and scored them.

Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service (aka Oracle Service Cloud) was naturally among those solutions, and came out with outstanding results. Here is the verdict… Leader in both areas!

Oracle Service Cloud delivers strong support for B2C companies. Oracle Service Cloud is a key asset in Oracle’s customer experience management portfolio. It provides a flexible, easily configurable customer service solution and is particularly strong in delivering consistent cross channel customer service experiences. It has strong multi-channel capabilities: very strong co-browse and forum capabilities; strong chat, email response management, social customer service, and knowledge management; and sound social listening, backed by very strong reporting.

It gets high marks for usability and provides sound case management capabilities. The solution offers quick time-to-value due to its SaaS deployment model. It has an average deployment size of fewer than 250 agents, and customer service organizations use it as a company-wide customer service solution, as a standalone solution to support its digital and social channels, or in a hybrid deployment to extend the digital capabilities of an on-premises customer service solution.

This product came to Oracle via its 2012 acquisition of RightNow Technologies. Since the acquisition, the product team has continued to execute on a robust road map of enhancements, many of which focus on tighter integrations to other solutions in Oracle’s customer experience product portfolio. It benefits from Oracle’s mature practices for implementation, user adoption, and support.

However, Forrester clients tell us frequently that they have lost some of their personalized touch that preceded its acquisition. Oracle Service Cloud is best suited for midsize B2C teams that offer robust web self-service and multi-channel customer service to their customers and that emphasize the value of customer experiences.

Customer Service Solutions for Small and Midsize Organisations

Customer Service Solutions for Enterprise Organisations

CX Workshop: Great speakers and excellent turnout

A great CX workshop, delivered by Oracle and CapricornVentis, last Thursday in London. An excellent turnout with almost 40 people attending. Among those, some of the most interesting and innovative companies in the MSE space.

The event kicked-off with an excellent introduction from John Glennane, Founder and Director at CapricornVentis, that showed some recent, surprising and real-world cases that prove the importance of Customer Experience in the digital world.

The featured speakers were amazing. Graham Hardy talked about the Customer Experience and his experience as Head of Customer Care at Boots UK. John Mihill delivered an outstanding presentation around User Experience and his daily work as Head of Customer Service at TM Lewin.

David Lopes, Oracle’s CX Strategist, was once more brilliant not only speaking about the importance of Customer Experience but also delivering a Fast & Furious version of a CX Journey Mapping Session, supported by Simon Miles, Oracle’s Senior Solutions Consultant.

In the last session of the day, I had the pleasure of delivering a presentation on how technology can enable CX, followed by a RightNow demo where I touched on Analytics, Customer and Interaction Management, Customer Engagement, Web Self-Service and Live Chat functionalities.

(Free) CX Workshop: Should Size Matter?

This Thursday Oracle and CapricornVentis are presenting and delivering a free CX workshop in London…

What can you expect from this event?

Hear from Recognised Industry Experts
Take part in a Customer Journey Mapping Workshop
Win a FREE Consultancy Day
Attend a technology lab on site at any time during the event
Share Best Practise with Industry Peers
Complimentary Breakfast and Lunch (to fuel your creativity)

See the full agenda here.

Date: Thursday, 20th March
Time: 9:00 – 14:00
Location: Oracle London City Office, One South Place, London EC2M2RB

Featured Speakers:

Graham Hardy – Former Head of Customer Care @ Boots UK
John Mihill – Head of On-Line Operations & Customer Service @ TM Lewin

Speakers:

John Glennane – Director @ CapricornVentis
David Lopes – CX Strategist @ Oracle
Luis Melo – CX/CRM Solutions Consultant @ CapricornVentis

Register Here

Improve CX with Dynamic and Intelligent Desktop

The Challenge

Organisations know that to provide a fast and efficient customer experience they need to empower their staff with a single, consistent and 360° view of the customer.

This need is a consequence of the fact that customers are engaging organisations through a large number of channels (in-store, web, email, chat, phone, mobile, etc.).

But also consequence of this increasingly connected, competitive and digital world, where customers expect to have their issues/inquiries resolved as quickly as possible.

The Problem

The truth is the majority of organisations (mainly in their contact centres) still require their staff to use tens of different applications/systems while serving the customer.

My experience has showed me that, when serving the customers, staff spends bucket loads of time taking and putting data/info from and to other applications/systems.

The most common operations are Alt+Tab and Copy-Paste! Frequently staff is lost amid so many open windows in their desktop. And the customer experience suffers with that.

The issue is that organisations have a huge amount of legacy and siloed systems. Those were put in place to address a specific need (new channel, new requirement, etc.).

Hence, organisations are failing to deliver a truly joined up, personalised and omni-channel customer experience due to the lack of integration between their systems and channels.

The Solution

RightNow CX has the answer. It is a strategic solution, rather than a patch for a specific need. It is a complete platform that offers single, consistent and 360° view of the customer.

On top of that, staff members are able to deal with any interaction (coming from any channel), from one place using the same application. Accessing records, information and knowledge.

The RightNow CX Dynamic Agent Desktop is a high performance console. Fast, interactive, user friendly, easy to use, with a very familiar look and feel (MS Outlook).

It is configurable, customisable and comprises a set of features, each representing a different and powerful way of interacting with records (e.g. Workspaces, Scripts, Business Rules, Workflows).

There is also a desktop add-in framework that allows the build of custom .NET components, controls, and applications (what we call add-ins) for the Dynamic Agent Desktop.

Legacy systems that cannot be discontinued can be integrated in the Dynamic Agent Desktop using different types of integration (e.g. surfacing, presenting, real-time, batch, other).

The Result

RightNow CX Dynamic Agent Desktop centralizes disparate information, improves response rates and agent productivity, decreases training and average handling times, increases efficiency and ultimately Helps deliver a better customer experience.

RightNow CX among the 2014 CRM Service Leaders

The CRM Magazine published an article “The 2014 CRM Service Leaders” coming out of their annual Service Awards. Oracle RightNow CX (aka Oracle Service Cloud) was again among the leaders, the winners and the ones to watch.

This is a summary of what I found interesting…

Customer Case Management

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: … Prior to the acquisition of Parature was missing core multichannel capabilities and knowledge management… [Parature] excellence at serving midmarket customers.

Oracle RightNow CX: highest scores were for depth of functionality… capabilities are strong… for firms wanting to streamline service and support to enable agents to handle multiple support channels.

Salesforce.com: highest score for company direction… not proven as a scalable B2C case management system… still missing key capabilities for success in the B2B world.

Web Support

Salesforce.com: struggled somewhat in the depth of functionality… great CRM functionality, but a poor multichannel customer interaction functionality.

Oracle RightNow CX: breadth of customer service functionality is excellent

Oracle Knowledge (InQuira): I’s the best-in-breed Web self-service solution; however, as a standalone solution, it is missing the escalation channels from knowledge.

Moxie Software: fairly basic Web self-service offering

eGain: good balance between cost and ability to customize

Contact Center Search

Salesforce.com: Though still fairly new, the Salesforce1 Service Cloud promises to improve search capability and make the process even more practical and intuitive for agents.

Coveo: has struggled to explain its very powerful technology and make its value resonate in the marketplace.

eGain: Though a very good product, it is not customer-customizable, and not a core selling feature.

Oracle Knowledge (InQuira): has a very powerful and very complex search engine, but its technology is essentially unchanged.

Oracle RightNow CX: following the acquisition of InQuira, Oracle is working toward de-emphasizing the search engine and slowly weaning users off.

Notice that CRM Magazine assessed the major vendors in 8 service categories. In here I just present 3 of those categories where RightNow CX and its direct competitors play. The scores were based on the following criteria: Reputation for customer satisfaction; Depth of functionality or services; Company direction; Technology costs over a 5-year period.

RightNow February 2014 Release

The February 2014 release of Oracle RightNow CX (aka Oracle Service Cloud) brings a huge list of great and exciting new features and capabilities that will benefit agents and customers, enhancing the user (UX), customer (CX) and also developer experience!

Web Experience

– Virtual Assistant capabilities were improved. To add to the human-like conversational language capabilities that truly understand the customer’s request and intent, Virtual Assistant has now visibility on the customer profile and interaction history, providing a more personalized, quick and simple dialogue. There are also some new OOTB reports around Virtual Assistant to track efficiency and effectiveness of this assisted service.

– Community Support Search will enable the search to be a blend of answers in the knowledge base and posts from the community. This will not only make it easier and quicker for the customer to find the answer to his/her question but also prevent duplicate posts in the community or interactions to the contact centre assisted channels (more costly).

– Dynamic Forms API was built and will make it easier to create dynamic forms (e.g. Ask a Question page). Until now developers had to write custom code (using the JavaScript API) to have a form-type page to respond dynamically based on the customer’s action. But from now on, using the Dynamic Forms API they can add dynamic options that are triggered by selection in drop-down menus.

Contact Centre Experience

– Agent Mobile App has now full support for Custom Objects, which means that every custom object can be exposed and have a workspace in the mobile app. It also has enhanced mobile workspaces with new controls that allow developers/super users to embed analytics, surface external websites, and display SmartSense controls. On top of that, agents are now allowed to upload pictures from their iPhone as attachments as well as search the knowledge base and add answer links to the incident response. Admins can also create a mobile navigation set.

– Asset and Product registration is finally coming in this release. Asset is now a standard object and there is functionality that allows asset registration and management. Customers can register their assets and view the service history through the Customer Portal, and Agents can update the registration on the Agent Desktop, as well as have a full view of the asset service history. There are OOTB widgets and pages that developers can use in the Customer Portal in order to create asset registration pages. On top of this, assets can be associated to specific SLAs.

– Microsoft Outlook Integration for 64-bit is now available and therefore users that have MS Outlook 2010 and 2013 (64-bit) are able to synchronize emails, contacts and tasks.

– Message templates enhancements were made in order to improve the HTML editors in message templates, making it easier to customize and personalize the content of the admin notifications, admin emails, and contact emails. These were also applied to the HTML editors used by RightNow Outreach and RightNow Feedback for creating documents, mailings, and surveys.

Engage

– New report delivery options allow the user/developer to send scheduled and queued reports directly to a compressed CSV files. Since this reduces the processing time, it is now possible to run reports that return up to 1 million rows (before we were limited to returning 10,000 rows), which is going to avoid bounced emails due to size and decrease report fail due to too much data.

– New Contacts with Invalid Email Addresses report was added to the set of OOTB reports and lists all contacts that have one or more invalid primary or alternate email address, resulting from both hard and soft bounces. It also shows the date each address was set to invalid.

Policy Automation

– Policy Automation is already integrated in the Service Cloud providing the ability to deal with complex customer interactions through personalized, consistent, and transparent advice. It was enhanced to further streamline the interview process and now has a new calendar control (that pops up to input date) and new tabular data entry control, as well as support for more languages – Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Italian. On top of that, agents are now able to work in multiple interviews simultaneously and the data in the interview is saved into the incident thread, either it is done via CP or Agent Desktop.

RightNow CX Showcase Tour

Between March and April 2014, Oracle and CapricornVentis will jointly host a RightNow CX Showcase Tour, that will take place in 5 different locations across the UK.

Reading, Berkshire – March, 11th
Manchester – March, 12th
London – March, 24th
Solihull – April, 3rd
Linlithgow – April, 16th

The main aim of this event is to show the importance and value of Customer Experience in today’s world, and also how technology can enable it.

Case studies will be presented by RightNow CX customers: Bourne Leisure, Paddy Power, Aimia Group, Fasthosts, Laterooms.com, The Trainline.com, Hermes Parcelnet.

I will have the pleasure of being a speaker again, alongside the brilliant and funny Oracle CX Strategist, David Lopes, and the visionary and exciting CapVentis CEO, John Glennane.

My session will be the toughest one – as it is just before the coffe break 🙂 … “How Technology can Support CX“, where I will present a demo of Oracle RightNow CX.

For those who are interested in attending, click here to register for free.

Facebook service is not a bolt-on, it is native

According to a recent report from Infosys, titled “Rethinking Retail”, consumers engage with retailers on Facebook (38%) more than they do via that retailer’s website (36%). This difference obviously increases when it comes to younger consumers. And 9 out of 10 consumers say that the social media engagement with the brand impacts how much they spend. The report also says that the main reason (38%) for retailers not being able to create a more integrated CX is the lack of technology.

RightNow CX combines Web, Contact Centre and Social Experience. The Social Experience enables companies to manage social interactions as a fully integrated part of the Customer Experience. It was designed to extend the Customer Experience to the places where consumers are learning, sharing, and buying – the Social Media. And one of the Social Experience services of RightNow CX is Self Service for Facebook, specifically created for the biggest Social Network (c. 1.5 billion users).

Back in July 2013 I published 2 posts about this topic so I will not repeat it here. I will leave you the links and invite you to read/watch.

But this is not all. Oracle has been improving this service and in the next few releases it will give companies full control over the Support page on Facebook – allowing the developers to change the look and feel by accessing PHP – as well as add the Virtual Assistant (already available in the Customer Portal) to the Support pages on Facebook.

This is why and where RightNow CX differentiates from its competitors. While some are trying to bolt-on some applications that will bring them the desired functionalities, RightNow CX was designed from the beginning to be a complete solution that enables companies to deliver a fully integrated Customer Experience across all channels.

Contact Centre challenges for 2014 fit RightNow

In the article “Multichannel viewed as the biggest contact centre challenge of 2014” we could read that…

… A new report from Magnetic North questioned 100 call centre managers to find out what they consider to be the biggest tests heading their way in the coming 12 months. The top issues managers are preparing to square up to are:

1. Managing the customer experience across multiple channels (44%)
2. Ensuring technology keeps pace with changing customer behaviour (40%)
3. Driving operational efficiency and cost savings (34%)
4. Developing agent skills-sets (31%)
5. Making the transition to a Cloud-based contact solution (28%)

Contact Centre Managers priorities for 2014 are very curious, and it is very interesting to see how they fit into the solution that is better positioned to help them achieve their goals: Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service.

1. RightNow delivers seamless Customer Experience across every channel. It has out-of-the-box capabilities that help organisations deal with customers that interact through the Web, Email, Phone, Chat or Social Media. And desktop add-ins can be built and used to accommodate any other way of communicating, such as Letters, SMS, etc.

2. It enables organisations to be where their customers are, and serve them where and when they need. Providing a rich online Customer Experience so customers can research or resolve issues, from any device. And managing social interactions as a fully integrated part of that Customer Experience – with special emphasis in the biggest social network (Facebook).

3. RightNow also provides a better User Experience. Its user-friendly and easy-to-use interface with a very familiar look and feel, makes the agent training quick and painless, increasing adoption. It delivers an end-to-end management of the customer journey through unified records, interfaces, and knowledge, reducing the effort and improving efficiency.

4. It comprises a set of out-of-the-box tools (such as SmartAssistant or Standard Text) and procedural automation (such as Guided Assistance, Agent Scripts or Workflows), common to every support process, that empower agents. Helping them to service and resolve customer’s issues, regardless of the channel of interaction.

5. RightNow is an industry leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, hosted in the Oracle cloud. Decreasing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and providing monthly subscription-based type license. It is very fast and easy to deploy and maintain. Also, as a cloud solution, it is easily scalable and effortless to expand.

#CX is not only applicable to Business

Customer Experience is not only applicable to B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business), in order to increase loyalty and satisfaction, with the ultimate aim of growing profit.

It is also applicable to G2C (Government to Citizen), G2E (Government to Employee) or U2S (University to Student), in order to enhance the service and support, with the ultimate aim of providing well being.

G2C (Government to Citizen) example

U2S (University to Student) example