RightNow announces real-time customer support through Facebook

As nearly half of RightNow Technologies’ clients now have a Facebook presence, the software-as-a-service firm plans to release a customer support module for the social networking site as part of its November product upgrade.

RightNow CX for Facebook will include support for the company’s self-service knowledgebase and enable community members to ask each other questions, propose ideas, share experiences and track discussions. But the offering will also enable customers to escalate queries to contact centre agents directly from within the application on either a public or one-to-one private basis if they desire.

Andrew Hull, the vendor’s director of product marketing, said: "We’re pulling together all the features that we’re known for across the web, contact centre and social web realm. Why it’s bigger and broader than CloudMonitor for YouTube, where you can monitor responses and get a call centre agent to call you, is that consumers don’t even need to leave their Facebook environment to get a full range of support."

To call centre agents, Facebook will just appear as another customer communication channel alongside email, chat and the like, which means that business process will not have to be tweaked. RightNow will need to enable its application to run on customers’ Facebook pages in order to make it active, however.

The offering is expected to be bundled into the firm’s Enterprise and Enterprise Contact Centre editions at no additional charge, but will likely be sold as an add-on for the Standard version, although details have yet to be finalised. The current usage-based licensing model will still apply, however.

RightNow’s November product upgrade is expected to focus on the introduction of new social media and contact centre functionality rather than the knowledgebase piece.