RightNow CMO: "Nobody wants to hear about CRM anymore"

RightNow Technologies wants to make a point. CRM is a bit old hat, it says. It’s got a bit of an image problem with the average man on the street. Nobody wants to hear about it anymore.

 

The on-demand player instead believes that customer experience is where it’s at circa 2010, powered up by a mix of social media and knowledge management. And RightNow has got more than anecdotal evidence to back this up.

 

"Certain terms and topics only have so much life – there is nothing you can do to re-beautify a topic that is dead," says Jason Mittelstaedt, RightNow Technologies’ CMO. "This is the first year that Gartner is not having a CRM conference in the US. Last year the show was dead and as one of the premier sponsors we sat down with Ed [Thompson, Gartner VP and distinguished analyst] and a few of the others afterwards and told them that they were missing the boat – nobody wants to hear about CRM anymore because they have heard it all! I went to some of the sessions and these guys could have given the same presentation seven years ago. And everybody knows it. So this year they repositioned it as Customer 360 Summit and were much more aggressive with the customer experience and social piece."

 

The result, Mittelstaedt emphasises, was that the attendance was almost double the CRM show the year before. RightNow has itself, of course, chosen to distance itself from CRM, instead choosing to deliver products under the banner of CX - unveiled at the RightNow User Conference last October as the "big brother of CRM". While such rebranding is nothing new, the implication that CRM has had its day has ruffled a few feathers in the industry.

 

Mittelstaedt is keen to clarify this position.