I have been following to the evolution of RightNow for some time (see Barack Obama’s Answer Center – Campaign CRM from RightNow and RightNow Introduces RightNow CX, the Customer Experience Suite). I recently spoke with Andrew Hull and Jen Page about their latest release. It features more features for the CX platform that continue to expand it social capabilities. RightNow CX addresses three primary customer engagement points—the Web Experience, the Social Experience, and the Contact Center Experience — to enable an integrated way to maintain customer relations and understand what is happening in the market in relation to your brand.

The Social Experience has two major components: the ability to listen and respond and the ability to build and maintain communities around your brand. We cover the enhancements to each of these components.

First, the listening ability through Cloud Monitor has been expanded with the introduction of the ability to monitor any RSS feed. In the first release the targets were Twitter and YouTube, now the RSS feed bring sin blogs, web sites and any other RSS enabled content. Later this year they will add the ability to monitor Facebook communities and MySpace. The latter is a RightNow client. Here is a look at the Cloud Monitor sources selection screen.

With Cloud Monitor you also can now create incident reports on what you find with open click and filter search by language.  Here is the Cloud Monitor response box with the incident report set up box.

On the community side a moderation workflow has been added to enhance community management. For example, you can route messages to the appropriate person for response and track that activity. You can also see more of a community member’s profile on an company agent’s desktop to enable more informed conversations with that customer.  You can also add elements of the brand’s knowledge base and add them into the community. In addition, you can add discussion threads from the community into a brand’s portal.  Here is a screen and diagram how you can move information between the knowledgebase and the community.

Other enhancements include the ability to provide comments to formal answers in their knowledge base, as well as rate answers. This was the knowledge base application used by the Obama campaign (see post above). It would have been interesting to have that feature engaged then.  This certainly provides for more engagement opportunities but requires a organization that is open to listening to its customers or followers.

We also discussed the RightNow Cloud Challenge. Andrew said that it is part of their commitment to making it easy for customers to business with them.  Some cloud providers have keep aspects of the old enterprise license model as the moved in tot eh cloud. RightNow has specified six components of what should be inciuded in a SaaS model to take full advantage of the flexibility it offers and they have committed to working with clients under these assumptions. These six aspects are by RightNow as follows:

No Shelfware – clients should be able to buy only what they need and still get long-term pricing certainty

Minimum 5-Year Pricing Certainty – clients should get long-term fixed and transparent pricing without long-term lock-ins

No Long-Term Contract Lock Ins – clients should be able to walk away from contracts if vendors aren’t delivering value

No-Haggle Flex Up / Down – clients should be able to easily adjust seats, capacity or even product modules up – or down – to meet their changing business requirements

“Roll-Over” Usage – clients should be able to adjust for seasonality without having to purchase capacity for peak usage that then sits idle most of the year

Cash Service Credits – clients should receive a cash reimbursement if a vendor fails to meet its service commitments

I think these assumptions all make sense to me. The SaaS market has seen growth is a down market because of principles like these so a vender will be smart to adhere to all of them.  RigthNow worked with Ray Wang, partner, Altimeter Group to make sure that all the important bases were covered.