By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is a Beach Boys-Frank Sinatra mix. It actually makes a lot of sense:
RightNow Technologies is announcing a couple new products as
well as a flagship product upgrade this
morning.
First there’s RightNow
Telesales, what the folks out there in beautiful Bozeman, Montana are
calling “the on-demand CRM market’s first comprehensive solution for inbound
and outbound telephone sales automation.” It’s designed to automate workflow processes and streamline management
tasks.
“Historically we’ve built stuff to handle inbound calls,”
RightNow founder Greg Gianforte told
First CoffeeSM. They found,
however, that their customers “want help with outbound calls. We studied it,
realized that the way people do this today is a manager gets numbers,” and ends
up mucking around with spreadsheets.
RightNow saw a needs for help with workload and management
metrics, “so we built a solution for agent and manager to create campaigns
tailored about specific selection criteria, and which then automatically
distributes workload to the telesales unit.”
The product, RightNow Telesales, provides an intuitive,
graphical campaign workflow designer that allows managers to “easily create
call lists based on any number of segmentation filters, assign calls to sales
representatives based on territory assignments or other criteria, and to
distribute call scripts that optimize articulation of the sales message,”
according to a RightNow spokesman. Related sales tasks-such as follow-up calls, letters, and emails-can
also be automated as part of these campaigns.
RightNow Telesales can generate personalized call lists showing
salespeople the calls they need to make for each campaign, as well as those
that need to be followed up from previous campaigns.
They’re also releasing SmartGuide
today. That’s a new CRM product designed to guide customers and service
agents through “intuitive decision-tree” logic. This gives users a series of diagnostic questions to guide them to their
answer.
Using RightNow’s patented AI technology, SmartGuide
automatically improves its own effectiveness over time by learning from each
user’s interactions. As more users
interact with the system, it “learns” how to get them to answer faster.
“It’s basically a decision tree template on top of an
existent database,” Gianforte said. “SmartGuide helps the staff, which might
not have been working for your company very long, maybe you’ve got some guy who
was selling jeans last week, sound like pros. It’s more of a multiple choice
than fill in the blank approach.” While it’s designed for more technical
environments, there is a customer-facing tool where customers can access it
online.
Then of course there’s RightNow
CRM 7.5, the latest version of their on-demand CRM product. “We’re calling
this the ‘Customer Delight’ release,” Gianforte told First CoffeeSM.
“There are three dozen new features across sales, service and sales automation.”
Gianforte emphasizes that its three constituent applications
– RightNow Marketing, RightNow Sales and RightNow Service all integrated with
each other in a common database, common business rules management, and a common
workflow engine. Passing leads from customer service to sales, data from
service interactions can be fed back to improve marketing operations, basically
“you can link customer communications through any event that occurs in your
business.”
There are dozens of improvements, tweaks, new bells and
whistles and rejigs on the new CRM release. Where does one get a few dozen
ideas for changing such an established product, First CoffeeSM
wondered. “80 percent of the improvements and new features we add come from
what customers are asking for, 20 percent come from the Big Idea, where we
think the market is going,” Gianforte said.
“We see our growth coming from speech. We bought a company
in Rochester in voice, we’re the first CRM vendor to have voice enablement in
speech recognition across an entire CRM suite,” he told First CoffeeSM.
In fact, speech is where Gianforte sees much of the growth
in CRM a few years down the road. “Speech recognition is important, CRM has
historically focused on automating Web channels or internal process. But most
interactions between customers are over the phone, yet this is the first time a
vendor’s introduced applications for their process over the phone,” he said,
referring to the eight prepackaged voice applications RightNow offers.
For on-demand in general, he thinks, the macro trend is that
this “method of consuming applications,” which costs less and provides faster
benefits, will be the dominant method. Simply put, software customers prefer
it: “Going forward, it has to be about what a [software] company does for their
customers, not to their customers,” Gianforte noted.
…
A tip of the coffee pot to Anne Leung-Stevens, just named Vice President of Field Operations
for Infotone Communications Corp. She’ll oversee worldwide sales and
support of Infotone’s coupler product line. During a seven-year tenure at
Oracle, she rose to Vice President for Oracle’s CRM sales organization, which
saw gross revenues in excess of $200 million.
Another tip of the coffee pot to Elvin Monteleone, named senior vice president and general manager
of mid-market CRM solutions for Sage Software. With 30 years of software
industry experience, Monteleone will be tasked with leading overall strategy,
operations and channel partner growth for CRM products including Sage CRM,
SageCRM.com and the SalesLogix CRM Suite.
…
Amae Software is announcing “successful
deployment” of the Amae CI Suite
Performance Console.
The Performance Console, a component of the Amae CI Suite,
is configured to display management metrics regarding company-wide customer
experience results and productivity analytics. Statistically significant
results and performance relative to goals are graphically displayed in
real-time on the Amae CI Suite launch page.
No user license is required for accessing the Amae CI Suite
launch page.
Gerald Wluka, VP of Products at Amae Software said “with a glance, our
customers can see real-time performance – including customer perceptions –
relative to goals and objectives.” Users log in from the Performance Console
and drill down to understand what is affecting customers – and why.
…
Global Crossing didn’t do as badly as some
analysts had expected in their Q2 results, losing $3.37 per share. One
analyst polled by Reuters Estimates had expected a loss of $3.99 per share.
Overall the telecom saw revenue decline 21 percent to $499
million, compared to $628 million in Q2 2004. Q1 2005 revenues were $526
million. The company expects to see 2005 revenue of about $1.8 billion to $1.95
billion.
Reuters analysis attributed the loss to “declines in the
company’s wholesale voice, consumer voice, small business and trader voice
businesses.” Net loss for the quarter was $76 million.
…
According to Asia Pulse this morning, Australians are not drinking as
many soft drinks, but upping their consumption of water and coffee. So much
so that Coca-Cola Australia is buying Melbourne-based coffee company Grinders.
CCA already sells Mount Franklin water and Fruitopia juices
in Australia, so when Aussies reach for water or fruit juice instead of Coke or
Diet Coke they’re still buying from Coca-Cola. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,
right?
First CoffeeSM has downed the occasional Diet
Coke come a sunny afternoon.
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