Listen to my interview with Jason Mittelstaedt, chief marketing officer at RightNow a leading SaaS vendor in customer relations technology.
In this podcast, learn why RightNow acquired community platform provider HiveLive this month and find out how businesses are incorporating social computing into their customer service and support operations.
Listen to or download the 9:49 minute podcast below:
---Transcript---
PW: RightNow has always focused, I think, on helping brand name companies automate their customer support. And so it was great to get you on the call today with us to talk about the acquisition you just closed of a company called HiveLive, which provides a platform for creating online customer communities. And I guess that acquisition is a signal that you're seeing some quite strong demand from customers for this kind of capability?
JM: Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, we just announced the closure of the acquisition yesterday. But as you know, we've been quite focused on the developments in the social arena for four to five years, and have really focused a lot of investigation in the space. And specifically in the last twelve to nine months, we've seen the demand really start to increase — really across all industries and, quite frankly, all geographies that we serve — and we're seeing incredible demand, and, I can even comment, at a very high level. Like I said, we announced the acquisition last week. We announced the closure of the acquisition yesterday, and we've just seen an incredible response from our customer base.
So what features in particular was it that attracted you to the HiveLive platform?
You know, the social space is a very interesting space and there's literally over a hundred vendors that exist. And so we took a very thorough process and actually took our time. We view this as a very critical decision for us. And so it took about a year to talk to over a hundred vendors and to really get our sense of the space and where it is today and where it's going.
Are there really that many vendors in the space, Jason? you said a hundred, is it so diverse?
It is; it is. And I was actually quite surprised by that as well because I probably could've named eight to ten, tops. But the gentleman we had completely focused on this effort, when you go out and you turn over all the rocks, literally his spreadsheet has well over a hundred vendors on them and he spoke to over a hundred.
So, sorry, you were talking about the features that stood out in HiveLive.
Yeah, absolutely. So, to be totally candid on the process, we went into our M&A effort with a pretty forum-centric view of the world, thinking that 'social' equals 'forums'. And going through the process and talking to all of these different organizations, they really expanded our vision of what social is all about, and what the potential is — and no organization did that more so than HiveLive. And ultimately, why we ended up selecting HiveLive, thinking they were the best fit for us, was they've really built the broadest social platform on the market today. And that's important for a couple of reasons.
One is, the whole space is so dynamic, right; it changes so rapidly — I mean you just look at what's happened with Twitter, as an example, in the last six months even — when you see what support organizations are starting to do with wikis, not just forums and blogs. And so one thing that was very important for us was to have a very adaptable platform that allows us to be very, very responsive and innovative as we address the needs of the market. So that was really one of the top reasons with HiveLive, is they had the broadest social platform available.
And then it was a great fit with us because the architecture is exactly the same, it's a LAMP stack. And that allows us, from a time-to-market perspective, to bring these applications to market very quickly. And our first set of joint applications will be available in our November '09 release, which will be overviewed at our user summits in the US, Europe and Australia.
Right, so that's pretty fast work. You mentioned it's a fast moving field. In fact, I think this time last year, if you'd used the term 'Social CRM' not many people would've recognized it, whereas now it's pretty much the buzzword. Do you think that this ability to interact with customers to have communities, to engage customers in the support process — and the innovation process and all the other processes — is becoming a standard feature in customer relations now?
Well, we're the first CRM vendor to add it as a standard feature. So I think we're leading the charge here. But as I look over the next twelve months, for example, I believe that a platform that does not have social as an integrated component of that core solution, quite frankly, will become irrelevant. And I think the impact here is almost equivalent to the impact of the Internet. And so you think about fifteen years ago, a lot of the traditional CRM solutions, they didn't have a web strategy at all — for email, for Web, for chat — and CRM solutions that can't address those channels are fading fast. And this is the next iteration, or the next wave, where the social impacts are an absolute requirement. And so my prediction would be that CRM solutions that do not have this as a core aspect of the solution will become irrelevant and disappear.
And you mentioned that RightNow is the first vendor to do this in terms of actually bringing the community capability into the product itself. Is that because it's very important to link the community engagement back into internal systems in CRM, like the support knowledge base and so on?
Exactly. And so I think there's a couple of connect points, that are just obvious at this date, that the market's at with social. One is, RightNow has the leading knowledge management solution on the market today. And so we have over 2,000 clients that consume that, and expose that knowledge through all the different customer interaction channels that they have. And so, in terms of your knowledge strategy, social should be part of that strategy, it can't be a separate strategy. And so one of the top recommendations we will make to our customers, is that you need to have a unified knowledge strategy. And social allows employees and agents as well as your consumers and your partners all to collaborate on a common knowledge foundation, in one effort.
The second piece is, from a support perspective, there's two important pieces of community. One is what a lot of people have called brand monitoring, but we have — it's really monitoring of the discussions that exist outside of your corporate walls. We have a solution that we introduced in May called Cloud Monitor that allows organizations to monitor Twitter and YouTube conversations, for example, pull those back into their support organization — to leverage the staff, the workflow, the incident management processes, the knowledge — to proactively engage with the discussions that occur outside of the walls.
The second piece of the pie is really what HiveLive addresses for us, which is the corporate-facilitated communities — whether those are blogs, forums, wikis, ideation, question-and-answer pairing — there's all sorts of great things going on here, but that's the corporate-sponsored aspect of community, where they come to your domain essentially.
Customers are going to have to learn quite a few new skills really to take advantage of all this functionality, aren't they? Because it is still quite a new field for everyone I guess?
It is quite a new field and that's one of the things that we're finding, as we look at the engagement process, and even the implementation process, with our clients. One of the things that HiveLive just did an incredible job of is, they built a very templatized and business-user-friendly configuration interface, so it makes the technological piece of it pretty simple. But what we find in engaging with organizations is, where they really need a lot of help, is on the best-practices side of things.
And so the HiveLive team is — this is another reason that we made the decision to move forward with them was — their expertise and their passion for social is second to none. I mean they're just a world-class team. And so there's a lot of value that's provided in walking into an organization and asking the right questions and really developing the right social strategy.
But in terms of people or organizations needing to learn a lot of new stuff, I think there's — in some cases that's true and in some cases, it's not. It's true from — they really need to get a solid social strategy that integrates with their business, so I think there's a fair amount of onus on the business strategists and the business management level.
From an agent and frontline employee perspective, I think the technology enables those individuals that are already trained to be customer-facing to engage with their consumers and their customers via a social fashion, that's really not that different from what they do today on chat, and on e-mail, and over the phone. I mean they're trained experts already at interacting with the organization's customers.
Right, so it's just a matter of giving them better information that they can use in that interaction.
Exactly. Better information and clear guidelines on, here's how to approach it.
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