0 RightNow Adds Social Community Capabilities (But Don't Expect Support Costs to Fall as a Result)

Summary: RightNow has extended its social media footprint by purchasing HiveLive, which lets companies build public and private communities. It also released a benchmark survey showing that online channels (email, chat, Web self-service) don't do much to reduce customer service telephone calls.

In keeping with my recent posts about broader utilization of social media, I had a chat earlier this week with on-demand CRM vendor RightNow , who updated me on their recent purchase of HiveLive. HiveLive provides a social community platform, which means it lets companies build their own discussion groups, forums and such. HiveLive has many features to support business communities, both in terms of engaging with customers over issues such as product features and bugs, and in terms of building internal communities such as project teams.

HiveLive fits with RightNow’s vision of giving customers a seamless flow between community applications and a company’s traditional service systems. For example, if a question posted to a forum goes unanswered for a specified time, it can be escalated into a service system as a case to be handled by the company’s support group. If I understood correctly, RightNow and HiveLive can do this already.

We discussed deeper sharing, such as having answers developed in a public forum become part of a company’s internal customer service knowledgebase. That’s something RightNow may add in the future.

Our discussion veered onto other topics, and in particular how seriously companies really take the goal of improving the customer experience. RightNow shared a copy of its recent RightNow Multi-Channel Contact Center Benchmark Report, which was interesting in its own right.

One tidbit I found particularly intriguing was how few telephone service calls are “deflected” into email, chat and Web self-service channels. In the survey, most companies reported that fewer than 10% of customers in those channels would otherwise have made a phone call.

You could see this as bad news for the theory that having alternate channels available will reduce the need for call center agents. Or you could consider it good news that customers have more choices to pick the interaction method they find most congenial.

Another interesting item was that 55% of companies have some mechanism to gather feedback from customers, but just 10% of those use an IVR survey, which I personally consider the most effective way to gain broad participation. Again, you can treat this as good news (at least half the companies are trying) or bad news (just 5% of the total are doing it effectively). Either way, it’s food for thought.

0 The Value of Intra-Site Web Search: A Personal Example

I’ll do a real post later today or more likely tomorrow, but I thought I’d quickly share a recent personal experience that illustrated the importance in e-commerce of really good in-site search.

By way a background: having a good search capability is one of those Mom-and-apple-pie truths that everyone fully accepts in theory, but not everyone bothers to actually execute. So perhaps being reminded of the real-life value of doing it right will inspire some reader—maybe even YOU—to take another look at what you’re doing and how to improve it.

Anyway, I recently needed a notebook PC with a powerful video card for gaming on short notice. Or, at least, one of my kids did. He quickly found a Web site http://www.notebookcheck.com/ that had an excellent ranking of the video cards. But there are many dozens of cards even in the high-performance category, so I couldn’t just type them all into a search box, either on Google or within an e-commerce site. Nor did video cards within a given unit necessarily show up in search results even when I tried entering them individually.

To make a long story short, we found that on-line computer retailer NewEgg had a “power search” option that give checkboxes for what are presumably all available options in a wide variety of system parameters—product type, manufacturer, series, CPU type, CPU speed, screen size, wide screen support, resolution, operating system, video card, graphic type, disk size, memory, optical drive type, wireless LAN, blue tooth, Webcam and weight. This meant I could click off the video cards I was looking for, as well as other parameters such as screen size and weight class. The results came back, and that was that.

We weren’t necessarily thrilled with the product choices at NewEgg, and there were several minor snafus that left me a little annoyed with them. But I couldn’t find any other site with a way to efficiently locate the systems I needed. So they got the sale.

(In case you're wondering: yes I would order again and, for all you Net Promoter Score fans, I suppose I would recommend them if someone asked. But they missed an opportunity to become my preferred vendor for this sort of thing, a nuance the Net Promoter Score would fail to pick up.)

I suppose there is a slight marketing technology angle to this story as well. NewEgg has to somehow populate its checkboxes with all that information. They must do this automatically since it constantly changes. This requires parsing the data from specification sheets into a database. As data extraction challenges go, this isn’t the hardest I can imagine, but it’s still a bit of work. It should be a good use case or case study for somebody in that industry.