RightNow CRM reaches far beyond just ticketing to improve all aspects of a company's interactions with its customers.

by Jeff Goldman [March 15, 2006]

Greg Gianforte founded Bozeman, Mont.-based RightNow Technologies in 1997, with an initial focus on providing web based self service solutions. "We've since expanded into full contact center and CRM capabilities, but at the heart of our system is an intuitive knowledge base that helps ISPs' customers find answers to their questions before they send an e-mail or pick up the phone and call," Gianforte says.

RightNow Technologies (877) 363-5678

The company now serves just under 1,500 clients worldwide, 40 of which are ISPs. And for many of those clients, Gianforte says, the single largest expense is customer service—which RightNow makes more affordable. "Typically, when we install, we can eliminate 50 to 70 percent of the incoming e-mails, and 10 to 30 percent of the phone call volume," he says.

While the company began with web based self service, it's now focused on providing a full CRM solution. "We have 400 clients now where we're running the complete contact center for both phone and electronic interactions," Gianforte says. "Some of these clients have as little as five people in their call center; some have as many as 3,000—so the solution scales very well."

Two years ago, RightNow added a marketing solution to its portfolio to help companies make use of the data they collected during phone calls, e-mails, and chat sessions. "For an ISP that maybe offers dialup services and broadband services, for example, they could go back through their customer service records and search for anyone who complained about performance issues, and target outbound communication to tell them about their new broadband service," Gianforte says.

The RightNow CRM solution is now made of up three key segments: service, sales, and marketing, with a total of 19 individual modules among them.

A collaborative installation process
RightNow CRM isn't simply sold as packaged software. All installations, Gianforte says, are made following discussions between RightNow and the client. "We sit down with the client to understand what specifically they're trying to achieve," he says. "An organization might have a primary objective related to reducing support costs, and so we might suggest they start with web based self service."

RightNow allows any potential client to try the company's solution in production before buying it, with no commitments—and just about everyone, Gianforte says, takes advantage of the opportunity to do so. "We actually deliver this 50 to 70 percent reduction in e-mails and 10 to 30 percent phone call reduction—and then, based on the results, they make a purchase decision," he says.

Once a customer is satisfied that the system is worth purchasing, Gianforte says, they often see the advantage of adding more modules on top of the ones already purchased. "They might add the agent desktop, which gives them a trouble ticketing system," he says. "They might add e-mail management, and at some point, they might add live chat if they want to provide that level of service."

The purpose of the consultation in advance of any deployment, Gianforte says, is to ensure that the solution is doing more than just logging trouble tickets. "We've done over 5,000 of these deployments in lots of different organizations, and we'll focus on those practices that we know drive customer service efficiency," he says.

Artificial intelligence
The greatest strength of the system, Gianforte says, is the intuitiveness of the knowledgebase. Rather than having to be built and adjusted manually, the database uses customer feedback to automatically adjust the visibility of content. "It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to predict what answer is going to be most helpful to someone, based on the historical experience that the system's had with the client base," he says.

That same functionality works on the agent's desktop. "We have a special capability called the Smart Guide, which is a structured diagnostic method," Gianforte says. "You can set that up, and then your newest tech support agent is going to be just as effective as your most senior tech support agent, because you've standardized the way you diagnose problems."

And if the customer requires it, the same structure can also be applied to the IVR. "We're the only vendor that can deliver that—the same knowledgebase in the voice system, as well as on the web, as well as on e-mail, as well as in chat, as well as on the desktop of the agent," Gianforte says. "So you make a change once, and now you've standardized that information across the organization."

Pricing and deployment
Pricing for the service is dependent on the set of modules the client chooses, but Gianforte insists it's always a cost benefit to the customer. "If an ISP has five people in their call center, you install our system, you're going to have the capacity of a ten-person call center and it's going to cost you less than one more person," he says.

"Understand that a phone call to an ISP might cost $20 for the ISP just to answer the phone, because they've got to have a technical resource, they've got to be prepared to do diagnostics, they've got to work the customer through it," Gianforte says. "If they answer an e-mail from a client, it probably costs $8 to $12. Well, a web self service session costs less than $1: that's the heart of the cost savings that we deliver."

Whether a client chooses to install the solution in-house or have RightNow host it for them, the price is the same. This means, Gianforte says, that the vast majority choose to host with RightNow. "Our profit margin is higher when we host, because when you deploy it on premise and you call up and say it's broken, it's invariably the infrastructure," he says. "So our tech support costs for on-premise deployments are higher than our hosting costs."

Managing business processes
Deb Kohls is Vice President of Business Development at Orange, Calif.-based Friend Communications http://friendcommunications.com, which provides online reservation systems and marketing packages for the outdoor recreation and travel industries. When the company was founded in 2001, Kohls says, they began looking for a solution that would help them manage their relationships both with their clients and with their clients' customers. "That was what led us to RightNow," she says.

From the beginning, Kohls says, they were looking for a CRM solution that delved deeper than most. "We believe in the self service model," she says. "Our whole application has been built around the model of self service—the web is all about self service and letting the customer have control of the relationship. So we knew we needed something that would do more than just track trouble tickets, something that would actually develop a dialogue between the consumer and the business owner."

So while RightNow may have been a perfect fit for Friend Communications, Kohls says it isn't necessarily right for everyone—anyone who adopts the solution, she says, needs to be willing to maintain the discipline required to use it as the management tool for the whole organization. "I would never recommend doing it if you're not committed to what the value propositions can be coming from a system like this," she says.

Kohls says the fact that Friend Communications used RightNow CRM from the beginning, rather than transitioning from another system, made it much easier to implement. "It helped us build our own business processes," she says. "So we didn't have the disadvantage of having already established processes in our organization—it was used as the process, and so everybody is acclimated to using RightNow to do their own job. It's created a real seamless flow of information about specific customer issues."

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Related articles:
	[Nov. 3, 2005]	Common Sense in Selling Services
	[April 16, 2004]	Beating the Branded ISPs
	[Sept. 10, 1999]	Keeping Customers: Part 1—Quality of Service

Online resources:
	Trouble Ticketing Systems Directory
	Quick Reference Chart