RightNow Revs Up CRM Portfolio

“Forrester has said we have the broadest CRM in the world,” said Greg Gianforte, RightNow&'s CEO. “We sell both on-demand and on-premise. More important, customers can pay by the month, buy an [up-front] term license or buy the traditional perpetual license, with support and maintenance.”

Last week, the company beefed up its portfolio with RightNow Telesales for both inbound and outbound telephone sales; RightNow SmartGuide, which creates a diagnostic decision tree; and version 7.5 of RightNow CRM, a three-module suite that uses common business rules, workflow and databases to tie marketing, sales and service functions.

RightNow SmartGuide leverages the company&'s knowledge management and artificial intelligence expertise to accurately and rapidly guide users to the answers they seek. It can be used for self-service or by sales reps.

“In a chat, people expect split-second response times. SmartGuide is valuable in quickly looking up questions about the products we are supporting,” said Ran Sengupta, CEO of TellnGo, a RightNow channel partner and online chat-service outsourcer, based in Cincinnati. “We can upload all of these recommendation rules into SmartGuide, and our agents would have it open at all times.”

RightNow Telesales gives managers a graphical workflow engine that lets them distribute work and assign call lists by a variety of metrics. It also generates campaign-specific call lists, creates lists from previous campaigns that require follow-up calls and populates lists generated by RightNow CRM&'s Marketing module.

In addition, RightNow CRM 7.5 has been enhanced with three dozen new features, “all of which were requested by customers,” Gianforte said. Among them, RightNow Marketing now can initiate campaigns triggered by events from other applications.

RightNow claims more than 1,200 customers, with more than 40 percent of its revenue coming from large enterprises. It primarily targets the call center industry, but also sells to government and the education market. The company sells both on-premise and on-demand versions of its software.