RightNow introduced RightNow Mobile in May 2010 and has now further upgraded capabilities in August with new cloud platform features. I have been covering RightNow for some time as I like their innovations in making CRM more customer focused and now social (see for example: RightNow Continues to Become More Social in its Offerings). The May release helps organizations engage and support consumers via any mobile device. Two of the initial clients tapping into RightNow’s mobile support functionality are CBS Interactive and Match.com. Both of these organizations have a robust and expanding mobile presence and did not want to have to custom build a customer support capability to complement these services.

I spoke with Andrew Hull of RightNow about these new capabilities. He said that companies like CBS Interactive and Match.com want to provide their customers with a unified experience. They have optimized their applications for mobile devices and do not want to have to send customers to a regular Web site for support while using these apps. At the same time they do not want to heavily invest the time and expenses of custom building mobile device optimized customer service apps. Mobile is one of their fastest growing channels so they need to be able to provide proper customer service.  Below you see the chat offer on a mobile device.

Here you can see a sample chat session on the same device.

The RightNow Mobile capability allows companies to extend their customer service with a mobile device optimized interface without any extra investment. With the May release the mobile capability comes bundled with RightNow’s product offerings at no extra cost. The system can determine which device the customer is using mobile, laptop, etc. and adjust the user interface to match the device.  Here is a link to a demo of their mobile offering.

I see this as growing need and think it is a smart move on the part of RightNow. The RightNow Mobile Web Self-Service enables consumers to search for help, view answers, rate answers, see related questions, and submit an email inquiry from their mobile devices to quickly serve themselves anytime and anywhere. The RightNow Mobile Guided Assistance allows consumers to engage in a conversational question and answer dialog for complex troubleshooting scenarios to get faster and more accurate self-service. Guided Assistance helps consumers find the right answers with a mobile guide that uses question branches to guide them to the appropriate answer or resolution.

RightNow recently announced their Customer Experience Cloud Platform. It includes a full compliment of services including the RightNow App Builder, RightNow Knowledge Foundation, and mission critical operations.  This allows organizations to create, extend, and integrate customer service operations in the cloud.  The mission critical operation includes infrastructure, security, and scalability associated with the on-premise solution in a cloud platform.

RightNow also recently announced their RightNow Cloud Services Portal to support the Customer Experience Cloud Platform. It provides near real-time visibility into RightNow’s cloud operations.  This transparency matches that available in the on-premise operations. It gives IT managers insight into the operations of the their RightNow deployment so they can make adjustments in a timely manner.  There is a single view of historical and planned operational activities, scheduled updates, sandbox locations, service level attainment, and root cause analysis for all incidents.

These are all steps in the right direction. I have been pleased to see the ongoing extension of the RightNow platform over the past several years.