RightNow – On Demand CX Software

Over the next couple of years, more and more companies will take the plunge into delivering a more “social” customer service experience, to better engage with customers while also improving efficiency.

Software vendors are ramping up, and customer-centric leaders are charting the future. Like iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba, a vacuum-cleaning robot that roams around your house cleaning floors automatically.

We don’t have one of these beauties in our house (yet), but there are three million in the field today, according to Maryellen Abreu, Director of iRobot’s global technical support. Along with other robots that wash floors, clean pools and handle military applications, iRobot found strong demand for these automated helpers.

As call volumes ramped up, outsourcing their call center seemed like a good idea to save money. But iRobot found that wasn’t enough, because they needed tighter integration with other parts of their operation, and faster access to analytics for decision-making. So, iRobot selected RightNow to provide a SaaS-based customer service solution, to serve as “the glue between organizations,” says Abreu, and integrated a Lithium-powered user community.
If a user searches a forum and doesn’t find an answer, an incident is automatically created in the RightNow system.

This is a great example of leveraging the best of both worlds. Use customer service apps for what they do best, and engage with customers using social technology. Customers are more engaged and get their problems solved quickly. The company provides great service at a lower cost. That’s the win-win that every customer-centric business should strive for.

Retention is top priority
In the past, to save money companies have either outsourced or automated service processes. Done wrong, this can be “penny wise and pound foolish” if efficiency detracts from the customer experience and causes customers to defect.

The conundrum is that while customers want lower prices–which drives enterprise investment in automated systems to cut costs–they don’t necessarily want to use those lower-cost channels. That’s why attention to ease-of-use and helping overcome any adoption issues is critical.

My research finds that in this downturn most companies are taking a more thoughtful or “surgical” approach to cost cutting where it won’t hurt customer retention. Yes, deploying self-service and social technology can help “deflect” calls from more costly live agents, but the automation better deliver a great experience and solve customers’ problems effectively or the phone will ring anyway.

Better yet, as customer service guru Bill Price advises in his book The Best Service is No Service, fix the root cause of the problem that creates a need for customer service. Don’t just automate, eradicate.

The next wave will be social
Creating more social or collaborative relationships is the third major wave of thinking in customer-centric business management over the past two decades. In the 1990s, so-called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was mostly about managing customer information, a company-centric view of the relationship.

But there’s more to a customer relationship than data management and process automation. The limitations of CRM’s internal orientation and technology-obsession led to the rise of Customer Experience Management (CEM), which is focused on designing and delivering loyalty-building experiences. And CEM is not just about using technology. Think about the retail shopping experience, for example.

And now we’re entering into the third wave enabled in large part by social media, part of what I call Customer Collaboration Management (CCM), which is about engaging with customers in a real dialog.

If you’re still not convinced that the revolution in social customer service is coming, take a close look at your customers’ complete service experience.
You may find that it starts in the social web outside your official service processes–when your customer searches on Google or interacts on a Facebook group. And the service experience could also end outside your organization–when the customer tweets about what happened on Twitter.

Granted, this economy may be a challenging time to venture into uncharted social waters. But I believe the next big opportunity for customer service executives will be engaging with customers in the chaotic world of social media. Your customers are already there. When will you join the conversation?