I have written about RightNow several times, (see Customer-centric CRM from RightNow and Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail). This week I caught up with Andrew Hull, their Director of Product Marketing and we discussed their latest updates. To put this move in context, Andrew said they have four core product strategies: e-self service, multi-channel contact center support, consumer-centric CRM, and building out the RightNow ecosystem. The current move, labeled RightNow May ‘08, primarily addresses the second strategy.

With their new online chat capabilities, RightNow provides enterprise feedback management capabilities across multi-channel customer contact points including phone, email and Web, across service, marketing and sales operations. RightNow May ‘08 takes this multi-channel feedback and automatically captures the customer input in a central knowledge base. The customer input is not siloed in the channel it was received. Then a company can take immediate action from this common knowledge base to deliver a better customer experience. Their response is also not limited to the channel in which the customer feedback was received. For example, they support online customer chat and can respond directly through this channel and then send an email follow-up to support their initial response. Here is an exampl eof an online chat screen with a survey.

Andrew said that their research indicates that RightNow is thee first to market with this complete multil-channel feedback capability in a SaaS solution. I think that cross-channel coordination is essential for effective customer service. I have created a number of call center support systems in the past and this was always a goal but we had more primitive tools and it was hard to get seamless integration and required much more manual effort.

You can now activate customer satisfaction surveys over the phone, via email, and on the Web with online chat. RightNow can trigger a survey after an online chat interaction with a service agent.. Results can be compiled for trend analysis, and individual responses are included within customer profiles to enable more personalized service on the next customer contact, regardless of the channel. Customers can also indicate in their profiles their preferred channel of communication. Here is a link to a demonstration of how the RightNow feedback system works.

This release is part of an effort to make on-line customer communication more personal. In August ‘07, RightNow added emotion detection features that gauge customers’ opinions by applying an emotional rating to text-based customer communications. In its February ‘08 release , RightNow added topic monitoring capabilities that automate the review of customer sentiment by grouping or clustering common topics within unstructured text responses. I think are these are all useful additions to provide a more human and empathetic quality to automated and on-line customer interactions.