RightNow CEO on Improving the Customer Experience

CIO —

For Greg Gianforte and his colleagues at Bozeman, MT, based RightNow Technologies, Inc., customer relationship management is so, well, yesterday. The key focus for companies today, Gianforte told IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant in this installment of the IDGE CEO Interview Series, is dramatically improving the 'customer experience' in all the places consumers touch organizations — from the Web to the call center.

Gianforte committed to the cloud delivery model early in the game, but he's an outspoken critic of how many software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors deal with customers and his firm is pioneering contract terms that make it easier for customers to pilot and expand their use of RightNow's customer experience suite with less risk and expense. In this discussion, he lays out how a customer-experience centered approach to business can change your company and what questions IT leaders should be asking their cloud providers today.

Tech Titans Talk: The IDG Enterprise CEO Interviews

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CIO —

For Greg Gianforte and his colleagues at Bozeman, MT, based RightNow Technologies, Inc., customer relationship management is so, well, yesterday. The key focus for companies today, Gianforte told IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant in this installment of the IDGE CEO Interview Series, is dramatically improving the 'customer experience' in all the places consumers touch organizations — from the Web to the call center.

Gianforte committed to the cloud delivery model early in the game, but he's an outspoken critic of how many software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors deal with customers and his firm is pioneering contract terms that make it easier for customers to pilot and expand their use of RightNow's customer experience suite with less risk and expense. In this discussion, he lays out how a customer-experience centered approach to business can change your company and what questions IT leaders should be asking their cloud providers today.

Tech Titans Talk: The IDG Enterprise CEO Interviews

You founded Brightwork Development, a network management company that was acquired by McAfee (MFE) in 1994. How does a net management guy all focused on the infrastructure get himself caught up in the cloud?

The genesis for RightNow was the realization that consumer expectations were changing and the Internet was disrupting how consumer businesses differentiate themselves. It's harder and harder for companies to differentiate by just adding more features and they can't differentiate on price and make any money.

I've done 140 visits so far this year with senior executives at large B-to-C firms and when I ask them what they're working on one [key thing] is always improving the customer experience. Companies are realizing that, in terms of sustainable differentiation, it's the only lever they have to pull. We saw the Internet disrupting that and creating an opportunity. [Improving the customer experience] is something that begs for automation and we saw an opportunity in that.

Before we get into an overview and explanation of the specific capabilities that RightNow offers in your suite, explain this concept of customer experience software and how it's different from customer relationship management (CRM).

CRM historically has been about sales force automation, contact center or marketing automation — it's primarily focused on making company employees more efficient. It is an inward-facing business application. Customer experience includes all that, but it also includes the consumer-facing components, such as that we help companies increase their presence through their Facebook fan pages or add self-service capabilities on the external pages. In fact, the sites we run on behalf of our clients, if you aggregate all the traffic together, we're one of the 100 largest Websites in the world. That wouldn't happen if it was CRM; it only happens if you're doing customer experience.

What don't CRM vendors get about customer experience?

We replace a lot of failed Siebel implementations. I've done that at Nike Worldwide, Sony in Europe and North America. Those systems have deficiencies: they're hard to install and expensive to maintain but they also don't do multi-channel really well. Consumer expectations keep rising and the people that Tweet about us are the same people who send us e-mails, are the same people that want to chat with us, are the same people that call our call centers. Traditional CRM doesn't handle that cross-channel flexibility very well. That's one dimension that's different.

The second dimension is that traditional CRM typically does not include integrated knowledge management and the ability to deliver effective self-service capabilities on a company's Website or through mobile devices or over Facebook. We started in self-service and knowledge management. Typically when we install for a client, we're eliminating 30% to 50% of inbound e-mails and 10% to 20% of the phone call volume in a matter of weeks. We've done this for Wal-Mart (WMT), for Nikon, for lots of brands you're familiar with. We also run self- service for many government agencies, like the Social Security Administration and Medicare. Traditional CRM just doesn't do that.

The last dimension, the third one I'll note is that traditional CRM has not integrated the newer social channels very well — particularly around discussion forums for consumer insight, for implementing enterprise feedback management. Having that as part of an integrated platform means that a company can take better care of their customers so they can keep them, they can cut their costs by making their contact center more efficient and they can drive incremental revenue as well.

Let's talk specifically now about what RightNow offers. What capabilities are in the suite and how do you sell those to people?

We're 100% in the cloud, 100% subscription based and very much focused on business value creation. We say we deal with the three experiences that really matter. The Web and mobile experience is category one. Second is the social experiences and the third is the contact center. Gartner [Group} has Magic Quadrants in each one of those areas and we're the only vendor that's on all three charts. We're in the leader quadrant on two. We're near leader quadrant on the third.

Slideshow: What is Cloud Computing?

In the Web and mobile experience, what we actually deliver is basically everything under the self-help button on the Web page — the submission forms, knowledge base, self service, e-mail management, live chat for either diagnostic and customer care or to up-sell/cross-sell. We're also on the homepage to help with conversion offers to drive revenue.

In social, we help people with online forums for call deflection related to support, customer insight with capabilities for extending Facebook — adding the same kind of e-service capabilities that we've been delivering on the Web for 14 years inside a fan page. We can connect Twitter back to the contact center for work flow and process management.

In the contact center, the third category, we're ranked right behind Oracle/Siebel (ORCL) on the Magic Quadrant and ahead of everybody else, way up in the leader quadrant. We're focused on the agent desktop in the call centers. This is incident management, case management, work flow, scripting, in the contact center. Contact center is about 50% of our revenue. The Web experience is about 40% and the remainder is in the social category.