Oracle in $US1.3b deal to buy RightNow

Oracle, a US-based software multinational with offices in Auckland and Wellington, said today it has agreed to buy RightNow – a social media-focussed maker of customer service software – for $US1.43 billion.

The Montana-based RightNow says it has 2000 customers worldwide.

During a New Zealand visit, RightNow social solutions vice president John Kembel told NZ that Air New Zealand and Telecom were among his company’s clients, along with several banks.

Taking Twitter from gimmick to industrial-strength
Every company these days has a trendy staffer who has taken to Twitter, using the social network to talk directly to customers. But if you’re a large organisation, the question becomes: how do you scale from gimmicky social networking, talking to a few dozen (or few hundred) customers, to industrial-strength tweeting?

Many companies have used free Twitter clients to set automated searches for mentions of themselves, or their clients. Xero, for example, is using Twitter searches to seek out customers who seem annoyed with its arch accounting rival MYOB – and chief executive Rod Drury reckons it’s a much more cost-efficient way of reaching prospects than buying Google Ad Words.

But what if you need to monitor the entire Twitterverse – which runs to 140 million tweets a day – for mentions of multiple products, in multiple contexts?

Mr  Kembel said one of RightNow’s key products, CloudMonitor, is designed to crawl Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, seeking out any mention of your product or service).

Social profiling
CloudMonitor aims to identify and deal with any potential negative publicity before it goes viral. And, and a more meat-and-potatoes level, to funnel customer queries fielded on Twitter (or discovered on Twitter) into RightNow’s call centre software, making the social network just another support channel, taking its place beside phone calls, email and web forms as just another avenue for service and support.

Mr Kembel said RightNow’s SmartSense technology can automatically flick support query to more senior personnel if a customer is agitated (for example, if it senses rising volume in their voice on the phone, or detects swear words or all-caps in an email), it can “auto-escalate” response to a tweet, routing it to the appropriate human. RightNow also offers a service to monitor blogs and online forums – both independents where your company is likely to be mentioned, or online communities the US company creates on your behalf.

Slightly spookily, RightNow’s aim is to create a “social profile” of a customer that sits alongside a customer contact profile collected by more formal and traditional means.

Playing catch-up
It’s all cutting-edge stuff, but Christchurch-based cloud computing commentator Ben Kepes told NBR that to a degree Oracle was playing catch-up with another US software company, Salesforce.

"The Oracle purchase comes close on the heels of competitor Salesforce acquiring its own customer solution solution, Assistly,” Mr Kepes noted.

“Many large enterprises see these solutions as their primary tool for customer engagement, as such a deep integration with their internal customer solution systems is critical - this is more of a reactive play by Oracle than anything else, they need to be seen to be playing in this area."