THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Being a technology innovator is great, but owning a technology innovator might be just as good. RightNow, the vendor of customer relationship management solutions that has been responsible for CRM inventions before, made its latest innovation Victor Kiam-style: It liked its new voice-enabled CRM platform so much, it bought the company that designed it.

The acquisition of Convergent Voice culminates a product development process that began last year when RightNow, headquartered in Bozeman, Mont., began to work with Convergent Voice to develop a voice-enabled CRM platform. The acquisition is also just one of several announcements RightNow made on June 27. The company also said it had received a U.S. patent for the new voice-enabled solution, was launching RightNow Voice CRM solution as a new product and had hired former Edify CEO Joseph Brown as the new vice president of voice solutions for RightNow.

Brown said that despite the existence of CRM systems that allow customer navigation via interactive voice response (IVR) technology, most CRM technology developers have failed to exploit the use of voice to enable access to deeper CRM functions.

“We are a CRM software company that is moving into voice,” Brown said. “Voice is just another window into CRM information. Speech-enablement technology has crossed the market chasm in the last year or so, and deployment has really picked up.”

RightNow Voice uses natural language search technology to help customers not only navigate but access a company's “knowledge base” functions, such as the incident reporting management system, order/repair/refund status applications, password reset and other customer profile information, Brown said. It's also a hosted, on-demand platform that improves upon the cost and complexity of traditional on-premises IVR platforms. A recent market research report by Nucleus Research suggested that such on-demand platforms are a recent trend in CRM that is beginning to be applied more broadly. In addition to RightNow voice service module for CRM systems, the vendor also is planning to release a sales module for sales team interaction with customer databases, and a marketing module to help marketing teams develop more targeted marketing campaigns.

Despite the existence and ongoing improvement of Internet-based customer service and other forms of CRM interaction, other industry analyst reports have suggested that voice still accounts for anywhere from 60% to 90% of a company's interactions with its consumer customers. The RightNow solution also could be deployed behind those traditional IVR systems for added CRM functionality, Brown said.

RightNow is no stranger to CRM innovation. The company's founder, Greg Gianforte, was behind the creation of the FAQ navigation functionality commonly used today on many Web sites. RightNow also has sold its CRM systems to many telecom industry clients, including BT Retail, Adaptix and Proxim. It made the decision to acquire Convergent Voice — a company that had been founded by a group of people who once worked on CRM products for Nortel Networks — not only to own the latest voice innovation in the CRM world, but also to control its future evolution, Brown said.

“We believe the phone is the most important interaction device for CRM,” he said. “Now, we can direct Convergent Voice into the areas where we want to see CRM technology go.”