RightNow CX for Facebook Allows Organizations to Seamlessly Incorporate Facebook into Their Customer Experience Strategies Consumers Will Get Exceptional Service from Their Favorite Brands without Leaving Facebook

BOZEMAN, Mont. (September 15, 2010) – RightNow (NASDAQ:RNOW) today unveiled RightNow CX for Facebook, bringing the industry’s most powerful customer experience suite to Facebook. RightNow CX, the customer experience suite, uniquely powers integrated web, social and contact center interactions anywhere consumers engage with their favorite brands. With today’s announcement, organizations will be able to seamlessly deliver exceptional customer service experiences to their consumers and fans across Facebook’s global social network.

Organizations can no longer dictate when, where and how they interact with their consumers; rather, they need to engage consumers in their interaction channels of choice. And with more than 500 million active users spending more than 3 billion hours per month on Facebook*, the site has emerged as a critical interaction point.

Greg Gianforte, chief executive officer of RightNow, comments: “Organizations are rapidly building Facebook pages to interact with their consumers. In fact, nearly half of RightNow’s clients have established Facebook pages. But organizations need to be careful not to just put up a Facebook page and create another silo; social networks must be seamlessly incorporated into their overarching customer experience strategies. Consumers who visit an organization’s Facebook page are likely to also pick up the phone or send an email. Only with RightNow CX will consumers be assured of a consistent and seamless experience across all the places where they interact with their favorite brands.”

RightNow Powers Exceptional Customer Experiences via Facebook

With RightNow CX for Facebook, organizations will be able to provide consumers and fans with a full set of interaction options

RightNow CX for Facebook will leverage the common RightNow knowledge foundation, interaction history, support workflow and escalation, community moderation tools, and reporting and analytics capabilities. This fully integrated solution means that organizations will benefit from a single view of consumer interactions both from Facebook and other channels, and that consumers will receive consistent experiences and seamless transitions as they traverse interaction channels. RightNow CX for Facebook will also be available in all 33 languages that RightNow supports, an important factor for organizations engaging with the approximately 70 percent of Facebook users that are outside of the United States.

With RightNow CX for Facebook, consumers and fans will receive exceptional customer service experiences without having to leave Facebook, including:

Self Service with the Industry’s Leading Web Service Solution

• Find Answers: Allows consumers to easily find the information they need, at any time, by either browsing through answers or entering search terms to receive the most relevant content. With RightNow, consumers can receive answers from both the organization’s RightNow knowledge base and its RightNow-powered community in one view. RightNow’s patented, self-learning knowledge foundation uses each interaction across web, social and contact center experiences to continuously improve the answers it delivers.
• Knowledge Collaboration: RightNow’s social collaboration capabilities empower consumers to assist in knowledge creation and maintenance by commenting on and rating answers that appear in an organization’s RightNow knowledge base. Organizations can also directly embed or link to consumer-generated content from their RightNow-powered communities to update answers in their RightNow knowledge base.

Crowd Service with Integrated Support Community

• Community Discussions: Embeds threaded discussions into an organization’s Facebook Support tab, allowing consumers to post new questions, ideas and issues to the community, as well as comment on and provide feedback on other posts. For organizations with RightNow-powered communities, posts will appear simultaneously in the Facebook tab and the community.
• Ask the Community: Lets consumers pose questions to their peers and then mark the best answer. Unanswered questions can be automatically escalated for agent assistance after a configurable period of time.
• Share Experiences: Organizations can harness the power of word of mouth to build brand affinity and attract new consumers by enabling consumers to easily share their service and community experiences on their personal Facebook walls.
• Track Discussions: Lets consumers view all discussion threads in which they have participated.

Agent-Assisted Service with Seamless Escalations

• Ask an Agent: Seamlessly transitions consumers to agent-assisted support with an easy-to-use “Ask a Question” embedded web form, which automatically routes the query to a contact center agent for follow up. Agents can respond directly from the RightNow agent desktop, and the entire interaction is captured in the customer record.
• Monitor and Respond to Wall Posts: From within the unified agent desktop, organizations can automatically monitor and respond to posts on their Facebook walls. RightNow’s SmartSense sentiment analysis automatically detects the tone of posts and flags high-priority comments for immediate follow up.
• Chat with an Agent: With Click-to-Chat, consumers can initiate a chat session to receive agent-assisted help directly from the Facebook tab. (Release anticipated in 2011.)

Comments on RightNow CX for Facebook

“We need to go where our consumers are, which means we need a comprehensive presence on Facebook. At the same time, our commitment to superior customer experience means we have to provide consistent interactions for our consumers whether they are on our web site, talking to a contact center agent, or engaging with us via social networks. We’re excited that RightNow is adding RightNow CX for Facebook, as it will enable us to provide the same great service experiences via Facebook that we do through all of our other channels.”

Rich Brecht, senior contact center manager, J&P Cycles

“The social media revolution has dramatically changed the way businesses and employees interact with their customers resulting in new investments. Contact centers that can analyze, monitor and integrate real-time communications with social media to improve the overall customer experience will gain broad-reaching benefits. It is very important that contact centers gain not only visibility of the customer interactions within social networks, but also the tools to engage and interact.” (“Social Media Is Changing the Face of Customer Service,” Yankee Group, July 2010).

Sheryl Kingstone, Director of Research, Yankee Group

“Not only do consumers demand consistent experiences across interaction channels, they want access to every service option via a brand’s Facebook page that they would expect from the brand’s website. What is unique and compelling about RightNow’s Facebook solution is that it will help on both these fronts: it will transform an organization’s Facebook page into a powerful support channel where consumers can get fully integrated self service, crowd service, and agent-assisted service; and it will help organizations avoid the mistake of treating Facebook as a silo.”

John Kembel, Vice President, RightNow Social Experience

Availability

RightNow CX for Facebook will be available with RightNow’s November 2010 release.

About RightNow

RightNow is helping rid the world of bad experiences one consumer interaction at a time, eight million times a day. RightNow CX, the customer experience suite, helps organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences across the web, social networks and contact centers, all delivered via the cloud. With more than ten billion customer interactions delivered, RightNow is the customer experience fabric for nearly 2000 organizations around the globe. To learn more about RightNow, go to www.rightnow.com.

RightNow is a registered trademark of RightNow Technologies, Inc. NASDAQ is a registered trademark of the NASDAQ Stock Market.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause our actual results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statement.

The risks and uncertainties referred to above include, but are not limited to, our ability to successfully market the benefits of RightNow CX for Facebook; and risks associated with general economic conditions; fluctuations in foreign currency exchange; our business model; competitive pressures; our ability to expand or contract operations and to grow profitability; fluctuations in our earnings as a result of the impact of stock-based compensation expense; interruptions or delays in our hosting operations; breaches of our security measures; our ability to protect our intellectual property from infringement, and to avoid infringing on the intellectual property rights of third parties; our ability to manage and expand our partner relationships; any unanticipated ambiguities in fair value accounting standards; and our ability to expand, retain and motivate our employees.

FRNOW

*http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?s=Top+10+Parent+Companies%2FDivisions&x=0&y=0

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Source: RightNow