Comparing CRM On Demand with Rightnow CX

Just out of an interesting three days training session on Oracle Rightnow CX and the product is just awesome. It is a coincidence that after writing the blog post on Oracle’s product positioning, I got an opportunity to attend this training session and it re-emphasis the fact that Rightnow is a perfect compliment to address Oracle’s Service side of the CRM suite of products

Being a customer as well as an implementer of CRM On Demand for many years, it is natural to start comparing these two products and believe that would be be the best theme for this blog than simple summary of the feature list of Rightnow.

Though CRM On Demand is positioned to address all the Sales, Service and Marketing needs of the customer, it is more “internally(Employees)” focussed than “External(Customers)”. The awesomeness of the Rightnow product lies in the fact that it is designed with an “Outside-In” approach where it not only addresses your needs to enable a multi-channel presence in matter of few weeks but also caters effectively to the needs of automating your internal ticket handling process in a seamless and effective manner.

Coming back to the comparison, I have done in under the below major heads …

Lack of built-in multi-channel presence in CRM On Demand is very well addressed by Rightnow

The first and foremost point is CRM On Demand doesn’t come with built-in self service portal to facilitate sharing of your knowledge base to your customers and also it also doesn’t provides a facility for your customers to raise a ticket / service request through cost effective web.Though there are number of vendors who provide self service add-ons for CRM On Demand, they come at extra cost.

On the contrary Rightnow comes with a built-in fully hosted self service portal that can be branded to your Organization needs and integrated with your corporate website in weeks. Needless to say Rightnow also extends easily your ability to Strengthen your presence through other channels like Social Media (Facebook add-ons), Chat with co-browse (for on-line trouble shooting). Email and Telephone (with pre-built adapters to speak to most of the telephony systems

 

Weak built-in features in CRM On Demand to automate ticket / Service Request handling is effectively taken care in Rightnow

Coming back to the employees side of the application, it is not only difficult / expensive to buy add-ons to strengthen your multi channel presence for CRM On Demand but also the support backbone features of the CRM On Demand is not good enough to meet your rigorous involved service request automation needs.

On the contrary Rightnow offers a whole lot of features that makes it jiffy to quickly configure your agents desktop and deploy your call centre / service desk operations in few weeks. Some of the salient features that I love to have in CRM On Demand but never came-in till today that I found in Rightnow are below

• All channels are tightly integrated to the Agent desktop such that Agents can handle client tickets coming from any channels (Emails, Chat, telephone, Social and Web) without switching to any third party applications (he can chat, he can reply emails, he can take / dial calls etc all within Rightnow agent desktop)
• To facilitate the streamlining of ticket handling process it has an effective built-in queue handling mechanism where you can define queues by various criteria like by channel, by nature of service requests etc. and assign to one or more employees who are qualified to handle these tickets effectively
• Rightnow has a built-in SLA handling mechanism  where you can define various SLAs of different service levels and assign different class of customers to it. The system automatically alerts, notifies and escalates agents / agent managers where SLAs are not adhered to. Needless to say that SLA management module has built-in country level calendaring mechanism to handle the holiday definition / working hours of agents scattered across the globe if you want to deploy the solution for a global workforce.
• Last but not the least the in-built visual workflow management is pretty powerful than one offered in CRM On Demand and it can automate almost any of your service desk process with by configuration instead of expensive customization.

Lack of fully integrated effective knowledge base in CRM On Demand is well addressed by Rightnow

Though enabling multi channel presence can bring down your cost, the real benefit comes from managing your Organization knowledge base to facilitate seamless creation, storage and sharing (internal as well as external) of information on demand there by bringing down the ticket handling time as well as reducing the number of tickets raised.

As for as CRM On Demand is concerned the only interface between Solutions and Service Request module is the ability to associate a Solution to Service Request. In Rightnow, there are many features that would really make your internal knowledge management effective

• The guided assistance is one such feature that helps agents to asks a set of questions (multi-level branching is possible) to your customers and on basis of your customer’s inputs it gets the right answer. This would be loved by any new agent who comes on-board to trouble shoot customer queries without support from his supervisors
• Similarly the tool offers an effective search mechanism on the built-in knowledge base with key words, stop-words etc. that helps to locate the right answers in a jiffy without hassles. It not only works on structured information stored in the knowledge base but also has capability to get results on basis of any unstructured information stored in the files, discussions etc
• The Smart assist is another tool for agent that suggests appropriate answers based on the key words in Service Requests, the product on which the ticket is raised etc on basis of back-end associations maintained by your knowledge management team.
• The built-in workflow is very effective to handle the whole process of creation, approval, internal / external (customers) publishing process lot effectively without any hassles
• Also provides a “propose” feature to convert your response to service request to a knowledge base article

My verdict in a nut shell:)

If you are a CRM On Demand / any CRM product customer and looking for a better service management features with built-in multi-channel presence, the right product for you is Rightnow CX solutions.

Going by the features I would recommend the product to anyone who is looking to deploy an effective multi-channel presence to take your customer experience level to greater heights in matter of few weeks ….