RightNow CX Cloud Isn’t an Oil Change

I recently used the analogy of an oil change to illustrate how we make decisions to obtain a service rather than doing things ourselves. But like many analogies, when pushed too far they begin to break down. After all, there is a limit to how much a relatively mundane activity like an oil change can be related to running a global contact center operation. Oil is “mission critical” when it comes to the ongoing operation of your vehicle, but changing it is fundamentally a simple thing. Even I can do it. The type of contact centers we support in the cloud are typically multi-channel customer care organizations ranging from the hundreds to thousands of seats, that are servicing, selling, and even marketing to consumers as part of their interactions. RightNow usually is deployed as the hub of this complete customer experience (CX) management.

At RightNow we refer to our cloud service as “Mission Critical”. We do so largely because that is how our customers describe it to us. To them, customer care is a mission critical operation. If the service capability isn’t available, there are real and very negative customer experiences being created. Frequently they have service, sales, marketing functions coordinated and integrated across the web, social, and contact center experiences. Lack of performance or capability in this category has real revenue and expense impact. Given that they are typically servicing ‘consumers’ rather than other businesses, they also realize the degree of impatience and high expectations that are involved.

We also refer to our service as “Mission Critical” because that is how we build, deploy, and back it. We focus on things like availability, performance, security, compliance, monitoring, incident management, capacity management, change management; really all of the risk management tasks done in any large enterprise IT organization. We also specialize in providing just this one service for our customers. This is the only system we run, we push homogeneity across our infrastructure, and we have invested in automation everywhere to “mistake proof” our regular tasks. Finally, when it comes to transparency and service levels, we give you the ability via our Virtual CIO portal to hold us accountable.

Oil changes are a simple thing to decide to consume as a service. Global contact center operations have significantly more complex requirements. At RightNow we understand those requirements and build for exactly what is required so that you can make no-brainer decisions to consume both your oil changes and your enterprise Customer Experience software…as a service.