Oracle RightNow CX is all about the customer experience, it’s about understanding what drives a good interaction and it’s about delivering a solution which works for our customers and by extension, their customers.

One of the early guiding principles of Oracle RightNow was an 8-point strategy to providing good customer experiences.

1. Establish a knowledge foundation
2. Empowering the customer
3. Empower employees
4. Offer multi-channel choice
5. Listen to the customer
6. Design seamless experiences
7. Engage proactively
8. Measure and improve continuously

The application suite provides all of the tools necessary to deliver a rewarding, repeatable and measurable relationship between business and customer.

• The Knowledge Authoring tool provides gap analysis, WYSIWIG editing (and includes HTML rich content for non-developers), multi-level categorisation, permission based publishing and Web self-service publishing.
• Oracle RightNow Customer Portal, is a complete web application framework that enables businesses to control their own end-user page branding experience, which in turn will allow customers to self-serve.
• The Contact Centre Experience Designer builds a combination of workspaces, agent scripting and guided assistances into a Desktop Workflow. These present an agent with the tools they need, at the time they need them, providing even the newest and least experienced advisors with consistently accurate and efficient information, whilst guiding them through the complexities of internal business processes.
• Oracle RightNow provides access points for customers to feedback about specific knowledge articles or about the support site in general. The system will generate ‘incidents’ based on the scoring of the comments submitted. This makes it easy to view and respond to customer feedback.

It is vital, more now than ever, not to under-estimate the power of the social web – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – they have the ability to cause untold amounts of damage to businesses with a single post – witness musician Dave Carroll and his protest song on YouTube, posted in response to poor customer services from an American airline. The first day saw 150,000 views and is currently at 12,011,375. The Times reported that within 4 days of the post, the airline’s stock price fell by 10 percent, which represented a cost to shareholders of $180 million dollars.

It is a universally acknowledged fact, that when customers are unhappy, they will not come back, and, generally speaking, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer.

The idea that customer loyalty can be regained by using social media channels was the subject of a 2011 Survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey discovered that 68% of customers who posted a negative review about a holiday on a social networking site received a response from the business. It further found that 33% subsequently posted a positive review and 34% removed the original negative review. Cloud Monitor provides the perfect mechanism for seeing what is being said about a business on public Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube posts; it allows agents to respond proactively – either by creating an Oracle RightNow incident or by using the same channel as the original post.

This leaves step 8 – Measuring and Improving:

• How does a business know whether it’s doing the right thing?
• How does it know if its customers are happy?
• How does it know if its staff are being productive?
• How does it know if its staff are being effective?

Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease.

Oracle RightNow believes strongly in the customer owning their solution, and to provide the best foundation for success, Oracle University can give you the RightNow knowledge and skills you need. This is a selection of the courses offered:

• RightNow Customer Service Administration Rel 12.02 (3 days)
  • Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand)
  • This course familiarises users with the tasks and concepts needed to configure and maintain their system.
• RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration Rel 12.02 (2 days)
  • Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand)
  • This course introduces basic CP structure and how to make changes to the look, feel and behaviour of their self-service pages
• RightNow Analytics Rel 12.02 (2 days)
  • Available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand (Release 11.11 is available as In Class and Live Virtual Class)
  • This course equips users with the skills necessary to understand data supplied by standard reports and to create custom reports
• RightNow Integration and Customization For Developers Rel 12.02 (5-days)
  • Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand)
  • This course is for experienced web developers and offers an introduction to Add-In development using the Desktop Add-In Framework and introduces the core knowledge that developers need to begin integrating Oracle RightNow CX with other systems

A full list of courses offered can be found on the Oracle University website. For more information and course dates please get in contact with your local Oracle University team.

On top of the Service components, the suite also provides marketing tools, complex survey creation and tracking and sales functionality.

I’m a fan of the application, and I think I’ve made that clear:

• It’s completely geared up to providing customers with support at point of need.
• It can be configured to meet even the most stringent of business requirements.

Oracle RightNow is passionate about, and committed to, providing the best customer experience possible. Oracle RightNow CX is the application that makes it possible.

About the Author:

Sarah Anderson worked for RightNow for 4 years in both in both a consulting and training delivery capacity. She is now a Senior Instructor with Oracle University, delivering the following Oracle RightNow courses:

• RightNow Customer Service Administration
• RightNow Analytics
• RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration
• RightNow Marketing and Feedback