I recently wrote about RightNow CX, the customer experience suite. A key component of this expanded social CRM suite is their integration of HiveLive after their recent acquisition of this community platform firm. I spoke about this move with John Kembel, the CEO and Founder of HiveLive who is now the VP of Social Solutions for RightNow. RightNow CX addresses the web experience, the social experience, the contact center experience of customers. With the release of RightNow November ’09, the HiveLive technology has been fully integrated and is now part of the RightNow Social Experience that includes Cloud Monitor, Support Community, Innovation Community, and Social Experience Designer.

Cloud Monitor was first introduced in their May 09 release. It is a web monitoring tool connected to the RightNow platform to benefit from other capabilities within the overall platform and enhance the ability to make a comprehensive response to what is discovered through a variety of channels. For example, you can switch from Twitter to a live web chat when you need more than 140 characters. There is also the Key Contributors function allows companies to automatically identify social influencers on Twitter, those with frequent tweets and a broad base of followers. (for more see my post RightNow Enhances Cloud Monitor and Graphical Workflow Design Capabilities).

The other three components of the Social Experience are derived through HiveLive. The RightNow Support Community is a social environment designed specifically for enabling peer-to-peer support and enhancing customer loyalty. There are discussion forums so customers can cover products and service conversations, share tips, and answer each other’s questions. The Q&A feature [MH1]lets customers pose questions to the online customer community and then mark the best answer and it can be escalated to your contact center if needed. The resource library keeps a searchable repository, including both company and user-generated content. The feature request option invites customers to contribute their ideas for a better product or service, and then vote for the best submissions. Here is a sample community home page.

The Innovation Community supports crowdsourcing and it is integrated with the rest of the RightNow tool suite. It is designed to add customer input into your ideation and innovation processes, so they can help you identify new business opportunities, guide your product roadmap, prioritize and refine ideas. The Ideation Center invites customers to submit ideas and vote for their favorites. The Concept Tester captures structured feedback that can improve the quality of your product, packaging, ads, and other components of your offerings. Here is a sample idea center page.

In addition to these two out-of-the-box communities for support and innovation, you can create your own community using the Social Experience Designer. You can design and construct new community areas from scratch — or use ready-made templates with built-in best practices. You can control who sees what content by defining permissions for every member, group and area of the community. The configuration tool offers a point-and-click interface for ease of development. Analytics and reporting are also provided for one-click data export, integration with Google Analytics, and an administrative dashboard for monitoring results.

I have been impressed all along with the comprehensive and interconnecting nature of the RightNow product suite. The addition of these community capabilities makes a lot of sense. With social media, companies are no longer in control of their messages. It is better to build the arena for social media discussions about your products than leave this to others.

Here is an interesting blog post by John Kembel on this topic, Social Done Right, which was posted after our conversation. He wrote that, “Deloitte’s 2009 Tribalization of Business study found that 94 percent of its respondents (companies hosting an online community) plan to maintain or increase investment in their communities, even in the current economic climate.” This is consistent with similar studies that show social media as a growth sector.  I look forward to seeing where RightNow goes next.