New tools designed to give agents greater understanding of customers

On demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) firm RightNow Technologies today launched its latest enterprise class CRM upgrade, adding new capabilities designed to help firms analyse feedback and engage with customers more efficiently.

RightNow February ’08 features a Contextual Work Space feature which dynamically changes the fields shown on an agent's desktop based on the interaction with the customer, according to the firm's vice president of product management, David Vap. For example if a customer is calling to register a product, the agent’s desktop instantly displays a product registration screen.

"We've focused on building out the agent desktop – it's important the agent has the tools to get the information they need [about a customer request] at their fingertips," said Vap. "We've also focused on making this [usable by] the technical business user, so you don't need advanced programmer to configure the rules."

RightNow has also focused on providing organisations with a function to help them automate the reviews of feedback from their customers. By clustering according to common topics and tying that information back to customer records, agents again have the "information at their fingertips" to enable the continuous improvement of services.

"We found that people in businesses love to survey but don't like to look at the survey results," said Vap. "From a technology perspective it's not difficult to do a survey but it is difficult to reduce the complexity around evaluating those surveys."