RightNow’s New Voice Experience Manager and Communications Enabled Desktop for Cisco and Avaya Deliver Highly Personalized, Branded Phone Interactions

BOZEMAN, Mont. (November 17, 2010) – Today RightNow (NASDAQ:RNOW) announced its next generation Voice Experience Management solution, part of RightNow CX November 2010. The new Voice Experience Manager enables organizations to identify a caller, determine why they are calling, and make an efficient, intelligent decision on which resource to route the call to, all in a highly branded and personalized way. RightNow Voice Experience Manager helps organizations engage in meaningful customer conversations to deliver superior customer experiences over the phone.

More than 80 percent of customer interactions occur over the phone*, making the voice channel a critical customer experience touch-point. Unfortunately, organizations frequently use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems as a call automation or call deflection tool, rather than as an opportunity to better engage with customers.

“IVR systems are often misused, and can erode customer trust with lengthy and confusing automation menus designed to keep customers away from live agents. With RightNow’s Voice Experience Manager, organizations can cost effectively deliver the very best customer experience possible over the phone. By identifying who is calling, understanding their needs, and getting customers to the best available resource quickly, our voice solution empowers customers and provides agents with relevant, contextual information to resolve callers’ needs. It’s about delivering a great customer experience, not just automation.”

Ted Bray, Vice President, Contact Center Solutions, RightNow

RightNow Introduces Voice Experience Manager

RightNow Voice Experience Manager enhances existing telephony environments with a customer experience layer, enabling organizations to get callers to the best available resource as quickly as possible. Whether it’s matching callers to the most knowledgeable, available agents or empowering callers with self help via voice response, Voice Experience Manager delivers a highly personalized, branded customer experience. Key capabilities of RightNow Voice Experience Manager include:

• RightNow Voice Library – More than 6,000 pre-built voice application modules that encapsulate best practices in common business processes, voice user interface design, and tight integration to RightNow CX. These modules enable rapid deployment of voice solutions, while offering rich personalization and improved management for voice-enabled applications; this significantly reduces development time and cost.
• Personalization Engine – Enabled by the RightNow knowledge foundation and CX platform, the Personalization Engine allows a single voice application to deliver dynamically generated information, customized for each caller, based on their inputs, preferences, interaction history, and context.
• An open standards-based Eclipse application development environment that supports a growing ecosystem of voice application developers, driving innovation in voice application design, and cost savings in voice application maintenance and support.

RightNow Adds New Integrations to Its Communications Enabled Desktop

Many times, phone interactions still require a live agent for resolution, and transitions from self-service to assisted service must be seamless. With November 2010, RightNow extends the value of existing call center infrastructure investments with integration to the industry’s most efficient and flexible RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop.

In this release, RightNow adds Cisco and Avaya to its expanding list of call center environments that integrate to the RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop. RightNow partner SimpliCTI Inc. integrates the Cisco UCCE and Avaya Elite call center solutions to the RightNow Dynamic Agent Desktop through its new media bar to provide embedded soft phone call control, customizable agent status, and screen pop within the RightNow desktop for telephone and email media to:

• Improve customer experience by matching relevant support data to the customer interaction
• Increase agent productivity and reduce handle times by putting all relevant information together on one screen at the right time
• Increase value to existing premise-based telephony systems by leveraging existing routing and queuing

RightNow media bar implementations can significantly reduce agent handle time, while improving the customer experience by minimizing the need for the caller to repeat information.

Comments on RightNow CX Voice Experience Manager

“RightNow Voice Experience Manager is designed from the ground up to enable a strong ecosystem. This will help INI build more innovative voice applications that are cost effective, both in their creation and maintenance. As a RightNow partner with 20 years of experience designing and implementing thousands of voice applications, we’re excited about Voice Experience Manager and the direction RightNow is taking with their voice program.”

Chuck Van Meter, CEO, Interactive Northwest (INI)

“When it comes to voice-based interactions, many enterprises continue to use archaic IVR systems as a siloed support channel primarily to deflect calls rather than offer support. It’s no surprise when this philosophy results in low customer satisfaction, low usage, and poor business results. RightNow is attempting to move enterprises away from customer avoidance via automation and toward technologies that enable customer identification, segmentation, and intelligent routing that matches callers with the most helpful resources. These are key differentiators for organizations that focus customer support around the contact center.”

Ryan Joe, Associate Analyst, Ovum Research

*ContactBabel highlighted in the 2009-2010 US Contact Center Decision-Maker’s Guide

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 our Voice Experience Manager and our RightNow CX November release; 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

Contact
RightNow
Chaundera Wolfe, 406-556-3323
cwolfe@rightnow.com
or
Horn Group for RightNow
Simone Souza, 415-905-4013
simone.souza@horngroup.com

Source: RightNow