I recently wrote about how the Obama campaign is using RightNow’s on-demand CRM services for its Answer Center and their Invite Barack system (see Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail). This post looks deeper into the services that RightNow provides. Last week Andrew Hull, their Director of Product Marketing, talked me through some of these services and offered four trends in the web 2.0 marketplace. I was familiar with RightNow as they are a case study in the WebEx book covering on-demand services, Why Buy the Cow?

As I mentioned in the Obama campaign post, RightNow positions its CRM solutions as being developed from the customer’s perspective while many of the other CRM vendors design their tools from the sales person’s perspective. As Andrew said, “With our roots in consumer-facing self-service applications, RightNow recognized the trend toward consumer empowerment some time ago. It’s one of the reasons we take a fundamentally different approach to CRM than the traditional CRM vendor…Typical CRM systems are designed from the inside-out, focusing primarily on internal operational efficiencies, such as helping a sales rep manage his accounts.” He added that, “from the consumers viewpoint, they are often frustrated because they end up dealing with discrete departments, not the holistic company from which they purchased their product or service.” I have certainly experienced this frustration in many call center interactions. RightNow designs its applications from the outside-in, around the consumer’s experience. This is certainly consistent with Web 2.0 where greater participation and engagement are goals. You can see why they were chosen by the Obama campaign.

With both web site self-service applications like the Obama campaign, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, and British Airways and call center applications like Black and Decker and Nikon, they embed an accessible knowledgebase to support customer requests. I have seen the benefits of this approach many times over in call center knowledgebases, which I have developed in the past with more primitive tools. When the call center reps, who knew what the customers needed, were involved in the application design and development, there were significant gains in performance measures like first time call resolution, cross selling success, and reductions in escalations to supervisors. Now with the better application integration available within the new Web, this approach should only get more powerful. RightNow can provide multi-channel content integration in customer service, sales, and marketing. This was one of the hardest things to tackle in the old days and yet customers expect it. RightNow offers one customer knowledge repository shared across applications that can provide a consistent view of the customer regardless of channel, product, function or process.

Andrew shared four trends that he sees in the marketplace that have influenced their product design. First, there is the proliferation of channels with the increased expectation of a consistent experience across these channels. New ones continue to emerge. I wonder when Twitter will become a customer service channel, if this has not already happened. These channels also have their own user profiles with wide variations in demographics such as age and technological sophistication. All have expectations that need to be met but they can require different approaches to meeting these expectations.

Second, Andrew told me, “service is the new sales.” This is driven, in part, by regulatory restrictions on unsolicited outbound selling activities so cross selling has added significance. It has always been the case that you cannot start to cross sell without a positive customer experience. Now that positive experience takes on a new urgency as outbound telemarketing is restricted.

There is also the rise of social network sites that can magnify good and, especially, bad customer service. Greater transparency rewards the good and punishes the bad with much higher speeds and wider reach. When I was involved with customer service training in the late 80s, there were rules like for every bad interaction, five times as many people hear about it as a good interaction. Now those numbers have increased by many orders of magnitude.

Finally, the “Virtual Agent” or “At Home Agent” is coming into its own – made possible by technologies like IP telephony that brings the phone to your computer. This is being used for home-based agents, to accommodate peak staffing needs, and for leveraging specific remote expertise and skill sets who do not reside in the contact center. This places higher requirements on company knowledgebases to provide a consistent customer experience regardless of the experience of the contact person. When I studied ROI for call center knowledgebases in the early 90s, the differential improvements from knowledge base use were greater for the outsourced call centers than the in-house call centers with more experienced employees. I can assume that these different needs have only increased.

As you can see from my comments, I found myself nodding in agreement with Andrew as I listened to the RightNow approach. It was hard not to interrupt him with examples from the past such as the ones above. I think it would be fun to be involved in a RightNow implementation. I wish I had tools like this when I did this stuff. The needs of customers do not really change across waves of technology. It is just the potential to meet these needs that evolves. The smart companies recognize this and use people-centric design rather than technology-driven design.