Oracle Service Cloud (formerly RightNow) Reviews

Scalable:

You can make it as simple or as complex as you need

Customizable:

with addins, customer portal custom apps, and APIs there isnt much you cant do.

Continous Improvement:

The constant release of upgrades and improvements keeps the solution relevent and useful

Ease of Comminication with Oracle:

If you have a problem you will always be able to get in touch with someone that can help. The support is top notch. They also are GREAT at using client input to see where they can improve the product.

Social:

The forums and cloud monitor are a bit clunky and frequently run into issues. The solution of upgrading to their SRM software does iron out much of the cloud monitor hangups but the forums still feel like they are out of date.

Billable Session

If you have a large customer base hitting your Knoledge base articles the billable sessions can get expensive very quilckly.

Omnichannel customer support for multiple clients. The benefit of having ways to defer call volume like KBs and chat help reduce cost

The analytical empowerment the system provides is a great tool to track the engagement of the customer and the performance of the support team. The system in general also owns a very good potential for customization and adequability to a large range of different business cases.

The Business Rules engine, despite of the awesome performance, is a very tricky tool to work with. I believe the experience could be simplified, following the idea of the rest of the system. The documentation of some aspects of the system also can be very difficult to find.

As a consultant and system analyst, I believe it is my duty to alert about the major importance of a good partner when implementing the system. I am aware of the potencial of this system, but I am also aware of the stress that the implementation can cause when two elements get combined: the lack of experience of the partner and a weak idea of the customer of what goal it means to achieve with the system. A good analysis IS necessary to do a good implementation! A good process desing can save the entire project!

The primary benefit of using Oracle Service Cloud is the possibility to know how your team work and how to improve the daily routine. Sometimes, even support aspects you don't know, you find a way of automate it. As consultants and system administrators I believe that we can affirm we solved a wide range of "blind supervisors" and drilled processes.

Advanced reporting features and the ability to quickly create workspaces and workflows to guide an agent through a complex problem. We have created dozens of workspaces and they do not take much time to look professional or function the way you would like to for the most part.

The system still has limitations that you can't get past such as setting the value of one field equal to the value of another. The rules are very easy to use, but some pretty basic things are not available. You are frequently reminded that you are playing in Oracle's world and there are deficiencies in the product that cannot be solved by an admin.

There are many consultants out there that can help with best practices and you will need them for anything very complicated. There is little to no support from Oracle in setting up new features, but they will assist you if something in the product breaks. There is a lot of documentation on their site that is very helpful, but only shows a basic implementation. Get multiple test sites so that you can try out different things and clone from your production site regularly.

We are transferring tickets from department to department, tracking call stats, handling emails from customers, and have 4 internal chat systems. The OSC allows us to very quickly stand up new features and continue to improve on them with ease, but we eventually hit a wall with the out of the box functionality and need to supplement it with add-ins.

It was built with a base of providing services end-end to the customers, basically a 360-degree view of the end users though all channels. Freedom for customization in order to implement the innovative ideas which eases the burden of customer. Ability to communicate with the customer in all the possible channels.

Even though Oracle pushes its users towards BUI, for many of the administrative tasks we still have to depend on Agent Desktop which looks is 1980s application.

I would strongly recommend this product because even Non-Technical person could also create business content that becomes end-user facing.

Incident Management is the key factor and Advanced Knowledge Base, Email Communication, Live Chat supports it well which reduces the pressure of Agents. We use lot of product and categories and creation of Dynamic Forms for Customer Portal and the combination of Agent Scripts and Workflow makes our job easy.

Easy to use, simple, it’s helpful for sending emails. It doesn't have a lot of extra features, it's pretty much just very straightforward and simple to use. You can easily find your unread messages, and respond to them and mark them as sent. Straightforward interface, easy to log into and load and get through all of your email messages.

Looks like it’s from 1982. It’s very bland and ugly with the dark blue tones. It can be difficult to see things on it at times because of the dark blue background and the small font, hard to adjust it to fit it all onto the screen properly. It also doesn't have good integration with social media or live chat for customer service options in case it isn't working properly. It good use a lot of upgrading to it so that it looks like something from the 21st century, and I don't feel like I'm back in time in the 20th century. Aesthetics are the main issue.

It's simple, easy to use, and can be helpful for customer service, especially in bureaucratic type of offices. It's very unpleasing and boring though, it can be difficult to look at some times because of the way that it is designed.

I use it for emails while at work. It's good at getting this done, but it really doesn't have much else to it. That's just about all that it is good for.

It has built-in features which enabled us to deploy with less customization required. I am also a fan of Engagement Engine. We are able to create rules which allowed us to control when to display our support icons.

I am not a fan for their 'Billable Session' concept.

Make sure you relate to your sales/ account representative your main objective - trust that they will provide you the right recommendations.

We acknowledged that we have different customer types and we wanted to make sure we are able to provide different support options. Launching Chat support allowed us to do exactly that. With this new support option, we are able to provide real time feedback on what service type their hardware requires. This definitely provided a better support experience to our customer.

Ease of use with no support needed from our local IT. As a hosted product, we are able to maintain the product within our contact center; making updates and changes on the fly without needing to submit support ticket.

The occasional disconnect between sales, knowledge experts and the overall lack of product knowledge sometimes displayed by staff. I understand the large number of confusion products, but I expect more than a blank stare when I ask, “What is the difference between Oracle Mobile Cloud, and Oracle Virtual Assistant?” I also understand that if I am in an information gathering mode, then I may be better attuned, but at no time should I know more about a company’s product offering than their own staff.

Do your homework, compare products and come armed with knowledge. Don’t just rely on sales and insist that you have a knowledge expert on every call.

We initially went after ROI, drastically reducing staff by 66%. We are now more interested in increasing service hours without adding staff, (nights, holidays and weekends), through automation.

There's a lot of functionality available to create this tool around each company's specific needs. You can fully customize views within the platform, create your exact report-out needs and more.

Compared to other email and chat platforms I've experienced in the past, this is very cumbersome and clunky to work through. It doesn't provide much efficiency in working through email back-log quickly. It's design is also very old-school. This isn't incredibly important, but for a tech-related company, I would think this is an important detail to cover and update to stay relevant.

We communicate with customers via email and chat using Oracle Service Cloud. The biggest benefit is the reporting availability with both email and chat being under the same platform.

The integration that is available, we have our database connected to OSC. The product allows users to submit tickets. US Air Force members will utilize online applications on various topics that affect thier careers. Our mission is to provide our users, the warfighters prompt service, so they can go and perform their missions.

There are certain limitations that CX has. We have so many different departments that require customization. We would like to see the capability for marketing, specifically targeted messaging to include alternative email addresses when emails are delivered to customers.

We are using OSC to handle cases that come in to the contact center from all users stationed all over the world.

Oracle Service Cloud offers an incredibly powerful Knowledge base that transitions customers seamlessly from self-service to support while offering incident deflection widgets to present help content. The robust webdav style support site makes creating custom widgets and pages easy with a bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript know how. The basics are easy enough to set up a simple knowledge base but the ability to add your own HTML and Javascript really sets Oracle Service Cloud apart from other Knowledge management tools I have used in the past.

The .Net install based version of OSVC crashes pretty regularly if you integrate multiple third party tools such as phone and text support. It also seems to be pretty heavy (PCs with 8GB of ram and third party integrations are OK but 16+ gb of ram is better). This is an unfortunate frustration for our support reps. OSVC also offers a cloud based console as well that is more stable but does not offer all of the same features as the install based version.

Embarking on OSVC is a journey that takes time and patience but is well worth it. I would recommend having at least 1 person on staff with HTML/CSS/Javascript experience to really get the most out of Oracle's advanced features. This is a powerful, well rounded tool, but I would not call it simple or easy to set up at first. A great implementation team such as Amberleaf is a MUST in my opinion.

Oracle makes KCS and self service easy to setup and maintain in a well branded support site that meshes seamlessly with our existing Product and Marketing.

OSvC is one of the most flexible systems one can use. Building complex DB setups, with accompanying work spaces and flows can be easily done through the UI. Since it does not oversimplify things for the Administrator, you keep all the power to build the system you like, unlike other systems, which are easier to setup at first but have the tendency to limit your possibilities at a later stage.

The Browser UI is the new web based UI and all development is going there. This means that currently you need to switch back and forth between the two when your Agents use the BUI, since most Administration is done in the console.

Don't pick the system that looks so easy and fast to implement. Carefully look at the long run and the flexibility the system provides. OSvC is one of the best at being scalable and high performing.

Streamlining Customer service. The versatility of the product also allows to integrate many otehr business processes, without becoming a cluttered setup.

Flexibility. It is rare you tell a customer that you cannot perform a certain action. The tools are there to accommodate to a lot of business processes from Customer Service, HR Helpdesk, Internal helpdesk. It is feature rich with Knowledge, Service, Chat, Surveys, Marketing/Campaigns, Basic sales, Social. There are some great syndicated widgets allowing you to place chat or knowledge outside of Service Cloud on your own corporate site. It is also very good for multi-language implementations and I've dealt with many using up to 30 different languages.

I've worked with this product for many years and I genuinely like the product and know it helps lots of businesses.

Until recently it was very difficult to copy config from Dev to Prod sites.

If you are looking to reduce customer contact and increase self-service and customer experience then this has to be considered. It is highly flexible and I've seen it benefit many businesses from many different sectors.

The KB provides a Tier 0 helping customers self serve. If the customer does contact you then you have an intuitive flexible view of the customer so you can see all their previous contact with Service Cloud (SRs, Surveys, mailings etc).

Integrated survey tools are highly customizable, and have enabled us to begin a real closed loop process. (Though text analysis is lacking). There is awide selection of included reports and ability to customize. The forums on the cx.rightnow.com community are often helpful.

Need ability to export records for archiving, or to query the DB directly. The documentation is often sparse and at times misleading. Updates are not added to the documentation and are only available as knowledge articles. The product/category widget needs to be searchable or type-ahead. If you have more than a handful of products in your tree, it becomes unusable.

Being active on their forums is very helpful to innovating and problem solving. Oracle has been "restructuring" so we have had high turnover of Sales and CSMs on our account.

Logging all channel interaction in the same place gives us the ability to better determine FCR. We are also able to consistently provide feedback opportunities to our end users to get a 360 degree view of the customer experience.

I like that I'm able to communicate effectively with all departments concerning the same situation. I work in higher education and am able to see what departments have been working with my students and am able to see notes taken so that there is little room for miscommunications, when used correctly.

The information between OnDemand and RightNow is sometimes delayed. There also is a dilemma of using too many systems since we have two emails for students to use. It can become inconsistent if training is not mainstreamed through other departments. The service also can be slow and there have been times where I cannot get work done because the system is down.

It is nice to be able to see communications if everyone uses it correctly.

We are solving the issue of miscommunication between departments. Because I deal with many different students and many different situations, it's nice to see who they have talked to and what they talked about.

Automatic routing of tickets to the right queue/team based on keywords and categorisation.

Knowledge base native link to incident management allowing quick find of FAQ to answer customer's issue.

Easy creation of reports using drag and drop designer canvas.

Co-browse should be totally integrated without the need for setup in different application or configuration.

Full-blow release manager and version control is missing.

Oracle Service Cloud is used across our organisation, to manage Customers, Contacts, Opportunities, Tickets, and Contracts. The power and easiness to use, as well as the integration capabilities allow us to co-ordinate our management, sales, delivery and support teams, allowing us to focus on the essential.

The product is an all in one solution for your customer center.

It can be used to answer customer questions but can also be used for some light surveys/marketing.

It contains a full customer portal.

The product is a bit expensive and the communications with Oracle isn't always the best.

Get a demo site and see the product for yourself.

You'll have to see it to believe it!

We have a lot of customers that are using Oracle Service Cloud as a fully functional system in their contact center. They are practically not using anything else than Oracle Service Cloud.

It requires relatively low maintenance effort as compared to other products such as BMC Remedy. It's very easy to customize and configure both the agent desktop and customer portal. Much of this can be done with little to no development knowledge.

Accessing the database for advanced analytics is basically impossible. Other solutions make this much easier. That said, the out-of-the-box solution does offer a large catalog of reports.

Figure out your requirements then have a detailed discussion with the technical team at Oracle--not the sales team--to figure out if it will meet your needs.

We wanted to reduce cost per contact and have been very successful by implementing this product. Combining the web interface (customer portal) for users and chat features have enabled us to significantly reduce our phone call volume and defer those to the lower-cost channels of chat and web submissions.

It’s easy to use, familiar look from Microsoft word, a complete unique way of helping customers

The fact that you can not add the plugin for Grammarly makes it hard for me

I found it very interesting to say this, it is by far the most easy software to be used, all I can tell is it’s worth investing in this software because it’s not difficult to use for both user and the support team, which makes it easy for customers to share pictures in real

We can help multiple chats at the same time and the freedom of giving you the time you spent away from paying attention to your customers it makes customers services the best thing ever happened.

Oracle RightNow CX, also known as service cloud is one the best tool available in CRM

its main advantage is its look and feel which is very similar to word and excel, that are widely used throughout the world.

the second is its ease of access and drag and drop functionalities which makes it easier to design.

Also, continuous additions in CRM tool(upgrade in versions) are extending the functionalities and improving the customer experience as well as agent performance.

The main disadvantage is that there is no possibility to request for trial version as a normal person, but the company should satisfy some criteria to provide access to the trail version of service cloud.

The second one is the system become a little bit slow while you are accessing very large and complex data or workflows.

If you have the perfect requirement that maps with the functionalities of service cloud, go for it.

its customer portal experience is an added advantage. Cobrowse and chat functionalities allow customers to directly interact with agents to solve their issues this increases productivity. the configuration is simple and understandable

The full scope of features available allows our Customer Care teams to work exclusively in Oracle Service Cloud when supporting customers.

Managing the local client application has provided challenges in our organization. We would prefer to work entirely web-based in the cloud, which is why we are eager to transition to the newer Browser User Interface.

Oracle Service Cloud provides our management team the visibility necessary to make changes and adapt to customer issues and product trends.

We have been able to customize the sites both internally and externally to meet the needs of our customers. The ability to single source answers and use conditional sections has been amazing.

I wish the wysiwyg editor had more flexibility and control and didn't required so much CSS.

Providing a complete service solutions for our customers. Our customers are all over the globe and this provides answers to questions without having to call support.

Reporting!! There are over 900 out of the box reports available in the tool, and they are easy to edit if they're not exactly what you're looking for. From a sales management perspective, it gives me visibility into my pipeline and upcoming tasks so I always know what I need to be focused on.

Knowledge! It's very easy to set up new Knowledge articles, and there are canned reports that show you everything you need to know about the articles people are clicking, if the info was helpful or not, etc.

Extensibility - the application has grown with us. As we need to do integrations or make adjustments, it has been easy to do. The application is well suited to integrate with other systems.

Agent desktop - this could be a little "prettier" out of the box. I think they have made strides with the browser user interface but we aren't using it yet. The process of modifying and editing workspaces does feel a little outdated.

Chat (customer facing side) - this is another area that seems a little outdated from a look and feel perspective. It would be great if they could make chat persistent so it followed you from page to page rather than having a separate pop-up window. It works, but it could be improved upon.

Answer versioning - the latest version is already rolling this out so this one will be resolved next time we upgrade! Previously it required the purchase of Knowledge Advanced, so I am thrilled to learn it's a native part of the product now.

For customer service, Oracle Service Cloud is a no brainer. It is perfect for multi-channel customer support.

For a sales team, the opportunity management module will work for basic sales scenarios, but if you have a complex sales/quoting process or want to focus on lead management, Oracle CPQ or Oracle Sales Cloud is probably a better fit.

Oracle Service Cloud has enabled us to support every channel we need to. It allows customers to pick their channel of choice and then it gives us a seamless view into the customer's interaction history. If a customer sent us a text and then Later called us, we can see the previous interaction in their customer record. It allows for an ongoing conversation with a customer across multiple channels without the customer ever having to repeat themselves.

When integrated with OpenMethods software all of our clients have seen a reduction in AHT by at least 30 seconds.

One of our clients reduced incoming call volume by 80% by implementing knowledge on their Customer Portal.

The sales dashboards gave our management better visibility into our pipeline and allowed them to much more accurately manage the business.

We appreciate the ability to point and click and make really complicated changes fast and easy. We no longer need a large team of developers to make things happen. A small team of power users is all that's needed to keep the application working. Admins are able to make changes and iterate on them to optimize them to make a great customer and agent experience.

The ability to influence changes in the product is hard. There is lots of solicitation for product feedback, but very few suggestions make it into the product. The smaller suggestions, that could make an admins life easier are rarely entertained or implemented. Larger scale suggestions wind up in the product and are either an upcharge or overcomplicated and don't feel natural to the product.

Talk to other customers in your line of business. Ask them what they did right and wrong. There are lots of areas where you can go wrong and leanings can be expensive. Spend the time getting your licensing right.

We have a great, easily configurable CX Platform that allows to be agile with changes and insightful with why our customers are calling. Never before have we been able to understand our business in relation to so many different facets of our business.

The versatility of the product and the fact that you don’t need to be a developer or even an IT professional to learn to maintain it from an admintrative view. Easy to use. Very flexible. Pixel perfect web design capabilities. Publi APIs are very extensible.

There are very few features I dislike. If I had to pick I would say business rules are a pain but it is in the roadmap to be updated

We solve our customers problems with experience. Provide best practices and strategic vision to meet their goals and help them become more efficient

My favorite prat of oracle right now is that you can do so much with just one application. For us, we use it for live chats, email communications from clients, and just recently, our CRM phone system.

Although Oracle allows our agents to complete many tasks within one application, the application runs extremely slow and often freezes, inhibiting workflow and reducing productivity.

Although Oracle Service Cloud allows many tasks to be completed under one application, the application runs very slow and often inhibits productivity.

Our business uses Oracle Service Cloud for live chats from clients visiting our website, email communications from clients visiting our webpage, and just recently, our five9 softphone.

Customers can use Chat for support, which allows us to the help desk to help multiple customers at the same time. Our Customer Support Center has allowed us to put documentation and help topics that are visible to the customer as well as the help desk in an easily searchable format.

Reports in Chat are difficult to create and understand. It would be helpful if there was a more in depth report guide so we could better create KPI's for the team.

Self service and multiple avenues for support

The variety of channels available to users at very few clicks grabs people where they are at. Users can pick from chat or emails if they haven't had their problems addressed at the FAQ level.

On the agent side, responses are easily designed on the fly or using standard text library or a quick search thru the Knowledge library.

On the administrative side - there are so many options available, it's important to have a clear business (and training) model planned out because there are at least 3 approaches to completing every project.

The training is a pretty steep curve for users. There are many features and it takes a little while to wrap your head around all the options.

Join a community (Regional or industry level) so that you can connect with others using the product. Learn the logic of business rules and workspace rules.

Have someone on your team familiar with HTML, CSS and potentially even PHP so that the customer portal configurations are not intimidating.

We use the product in higher ed - and use it for prospects, admissions, special book orders, workshop registrations, student reminders, 1-on-1 coaching, and simply tracking interactions with every student we connect with.

I love the ability to post images and html through the chat window. This is helpful when communicating directions to customers.

Rightnow crashes on us on a bi-weekly basis. We have a team of roughly 30 support reps using the software. It's not that large of a department, but Oracle seems to have issues with it. We had less issues with other chat systems.

Consider how many users will be utilizing the software. With 30+ reps, it can have issues, and many reps often have to restart their software in the middle of chatting with customers.

We're using it for tech support for our customers. It's easy to be able to give the customers directions in the chat.

The ability to handle multiple chats at once, and the option to have a sounds notification when a chat comes in or a response in a chat.

For a long time, it would automatically time out after 5 minutes of inactivity. Now, however, it sits there for forever until we finally terminate.

The major benefit for our customers is the ability for overseas customers to be able to chat without having to call long distance.

Skill based routing. I helps reduce time wasting and increases efficiency.

Embedding images into knowledge base articles should be made easier.

With limitless possibilities companies will have the opportunity to have an all round solution for customer service.

Incident management. Increase efficiency and customer satisfaction.

The flexibility of the OSC and the ability to fit almost everyone needs is amazing

There are still some limitations like for example, not every table can be used on CP

We use the OSC as a phone call tracking system also to resolve customers issues by transferring incidents from a team to another.

We use lots of reports to analyze our phone calls the type of issues that we can help out customers with.

Not much. I suppose it does the job (when it works) of connecting support agents to their customers but that's about it.

It's laggy, graphically glitchy, slow to load chats, assuming chats load at all, and very not user friendly on the design front.

Run away. Even the monster that is the Salesforce platform is better than Oracle Service Cloud.

We're able to chat to customers, that's about it.

I like the fact easy to use interface and all the features and capabilities the application offers. Plus, it's all in the cloud. And the fact that it is relatively easy to implement/ configure.

I didn't like the fact that it didn't let you use Customs Objects with Business Rules, but it look s like it is something that have been addressed with latest releases.

Mainly trying to track service requests since there was nothing like that before.

The ease and convenience of use. It's straight forward and the layout is simple.

There isn't anything I dislike with Oracle Service Cloud

We use Oracle Service Cloud as a chat platform for our clients

The convenience of Oracle Service Cloud helps minimize the overhead for my company

Sometimes there is a slight lag as compared to when we used local servers

Deployment has become a simpler process

Customization is key in our organization, no company is like any other, the fact that you can customize any little detail, language, colors, reports, integrated tools, reports.

Co-browse is a great tool, but often fails and turns away users

Smarter, historical interactions, implementation of CP has been great, Chat and AAQ opened more than one channels to reach us lowering inobund interactions.

Oracle Service Cloud is a robust, sure to please chat platform with so many more capabilities, we haven't even scratched the surface! Think email marketing tied to chat tied to CRM with Knowledge base - and don't forget about their SmartAssistant VA/Chatbot technology down the road!

Not super intuitive (seems like a developer module at times), but with some help from Oracle and third-party vendor, learning how to make it work.

Partner with 3rd-party vendor for advanced implementation.

Reporting features makes analysis of many aspects of chat program a step above the rest. Chat overall is always a success to any company, benefitting the bottom line without question.

It is easy to use and navigate. It gives a holistic view of the customer, and is easy follow and do the job!

Sometimes it can take time to load and will crash via live chats, depending on how many are being taken.

Being able to track, follow up, and service customers in a timely fashion.

This program was great. You could easily se what is going on in your cases. It is very easy to order parts and dispatch an engineer to customers site. I really liked the way you could find stuff from previous cases and generally all search options and results are great.

The only disadvantage I see is that it was running rather slow.

It is really a great software.

Opening customer cases or working on cases customers had aleady opened, ordering spare parts and dispatching engineers.

It keeps records of all emails/chats that are had with each other customer organized and it is able to be easily adjusted to fit each business.

There isn't much to dislike about it. I do have to reset the cache sometimes to make it run faster.

It is the way customers are able to communicate with the company I work via email or by chat. As well it the company's internal messaging program between departments in the call center.

Its easy to navigate and you can go back to review what was submitted in a previous ticket.Its great for documenting calls so if there is any misunderstandings we can refer back to the ticket.

It crashes from time to time which then affect me performing my job which isnt really helpful on my end.

It allows us to document each call which can be pulled up to review what happened in a call.

Configuration

Expanding

Node configuration

Cost

Service of the support staff

Technical support is so multi layered, where u can to have access to technical team easily

Proof of concept , Usage of industry software without acquiring them

I have not found it very useful. Very sad to say.

The oracle cloud is very slow and takes two weeks to load data.

Many developers and we need an evironment to develop in.

The software is quick and easy to use. The way the application formats responses is great!

The software seems outdated to an extent. It could be updated to reflect a new UI in the future.

Is to use and quick to setup.

We are solving customer concerns with Oracle Service Cloud. It's an easy way for customers to submit their concerns and have them answered.

The best thing I like about the cloud is the interface and easy to understand.

Although haven't explored all the options yet, would say none for now

Maintain the service

Ease of use for end users; ability to track

Need to include more advanced reporting options

Operational efficiency

All the possibilities that Oracle Service Cloud provides.

We are still looking for something to point it

Improving our convertion rate

The environment in which Oracle Service Cloud works is intuitive and accessible. I enjoy the ability to customize buttons to accommodate our needs in the environment.

I am quite please with the functionality of Oracle Service Cloud.

No recommendations

We are logging in all interactions - reports are easy to produce.

Application engineering with open source tech

24hrs support/maintenance

relational rdbms flavour

Licensing costs

The ability to solve customer issues in one platform is truly the amazing part, many other software's require you to be logged into several applications just to solve one issue.

Constant reinstalling of the application

Utilizing Oracle Service Cloud allows me to look up customer accounts, make changes and corrections.

It well suited for my line of business. The inventory mgmt is a good feature. I would have to use the product more extensively in order to give a better review.

I have not come across a feature that I may that I dislike

Self service paswd resets

The early funny ones...seriously, the early days. Greg Gianforte actually came to Polaroid back in 2000 to assist us in writing 'business rules' which were new to the product at that time. It was a smaller team and the CRM worked like it was created by one company. As they grew, the software worked as if different departments were writing code and never speaking to each other.

The lack of focus on the 'contact', my customer. They just couldn't understand why I needed a "contact merge" tool. (really?) The contact was like a bastard child. I never understood that. The whole multi-language piece is cluster truck. Again, they just didn't understand how the end-user was going to use this, especially if I didn't have CRM managers in each language.

It's a powerful tool, but it has many issues that will probably never get resolved. I would say to look around. I am extremely happy using Parature CRM at ZINK Imaging. An amazing easy-to-use solution. I choose it after reviewing RNT and SalesForce. (Don't even get me started on SalesForce and their sales team...)

I did have great success with the tool, don't get me wrong. We saved millions at Polaroid by implementing RNT at the time we did. But a fair amount of bumps and unresolved issues turned me into a constant complainer.

a system for customer service contact notes

sometimes it was difficult to find a customer or incident #

make sure you know what needs your business has, and if this will help

It's nice to have notes all in one system

Quite literally not a darn thing. This program is the absolute worst part of my job and both sides/consoles I work with.

Again, basically everything. Too many buttons to do the same things.

Customer service, email correspondence, content creation/publication,

I love that I can take chats through Right Now however there are some glitches

The lag between my chats and slowness is ridiculous

It provides my department the ability to resolve issues with customers via chat and email

Their social web is very compact and efficient

The integration of all apps can be a bit confusing

I use oracle to log in to the network and be able to work remotely sometimes and service desk

The internal help platform allows company employees to answer one another's questions in a timely manner.

The social aspects of the platform are difficult to sell into many valuable verticals, i.e. Pharma, Life Science, etc.

Optimizing social for companies that badly need it; keeping better track of CRM.

Rightnow includes many items in their service that others charge extra for. For what is included it's a great service with many features. Setup can be simple or it can be quite complicated. Simple to get it up and running quickly knowing you can add to it later is a bonus. There is plenty in the way of analytics to get you started. The depth of reporting can be quite crazy, so you will need someone with a good SQL understanding to get the most out of it. But it can far exceed any cloud based offering. If you have a good web team, then the customer portal can be configured in just about any way you prefer.

Things need to be done in a certain order and that order is not always known. You can jump right in creating items not knowing that other things are required for them. And when making those there are requirements for that. Documentation helps, but it can be overwhelming especially with reporting. Some permission options seems strange, but there is hope that will be fixed.

Not sure I would agree this is a cloud service since the main client is installed on the agents PC. But the data can be hosted with RightNow and that is a plus. They have made great strides in the software since i started using it long ago. It looks better, is easier to use, and hopefully Oracle does not take over to heavily and push it in the wrong direction.

We evaluate other packages when we can and I have seen quite a few options. Most cloud based services are for small to medium businesses. The analytics is limited and the configuration is minimal. I have also seen that most of what you can find on the internet for CRM packages are geared towards sales and marketing. Many have either lost or ignored the service part. This is not the case with Rightnow. They are mainly the service part. The marketing side is much improved, and you can use RightNow for sales if want to devote the time for setup and configuration. It's strong at service and if you want to keep customers then you need good service. Rightnow can be as strong as your willing to make it.

The RightNow Cloud Service offer a wide range of tools for all possible service approaches.

You can implement features from live-chat to hosted self-service pages in all possible languages.

The base tool set is not enough to offer a sophisticated service experience to your customers, all additional adjustments, features are linked to massive costs, starting from seats, to sessions and hidden costs like several hundred Euros per month for a SSL encryption of your self service portal.

This system only makes sense if you ar going all-in.

You need a detailed and clear plan of what you want to achieve. Make sure you have the money to hire an dedicated admin for this entire system, in addition to the support Oracle offers.

As a workflow management & tracking tool, RightNow CX exceeds our expectations. We have begun utilizing Chat & Customer Portal functionality a little over a year ago and plan to expand this. This product fits well into our user environment & allows customization to meet the needs of our various user groups. Reporting is excellent and allows us to be as granular or as high level as we need to be.

More robust & flexible use of variables in reporting would be a nice enhancement. Additionally, more intuitive rule development & use at the workspace & business rule level would be a significant improvement too.

I would absolutely recommend this product to others considering it. There are some parts of this product that other organizations could take better adavantage of than we do too!

Plenty of data given for reps, great for integration of multiple services..

Add ons sometimes do not function properly.

Our business uses this service for email, chat and phone functions.

We liked what we were sold… the vision of a top-of-the line community platform. Social monitoring. Gamification. Customer interaction. Input on product development / innovation. It all sounded great. The product management team in Boulder was great. Account management started off great.

The page load time was irritatingly too long. The cost was super expensive. The social monitoring tool was sold with the capability of monitoring sentiment of the community conversations – that never worked. I’m not sure if it was the Oracle acquisition, or what but willingness to work with us seemed to disappear. The PM team in Boulder and the folks in Bozeman changed their tune from, “It’ll work in the next release” to “Sorry it’s just never going to work.”

It might be the ideal solution for you, it just didn’t work for me. I’d recommend that the features you’re sold on are worked into the SLA. Also, make sure to include an acceptable page load time into your agreement as well.

Ease of use of the knowledge base and live chat

Should have fewer click throughs but this is just a suggestion

CRM

Customer Self- Service feature which helped us in reducing staff

Social Customer service feature needs more improvement

Customer Self Service Portal

We implemented RightNow prior to Salesforce, so from a cusomter service perspective, it worked great. Our PIC agents were abot to take calls and track them and assign to proper business units with ease. No real headaches.

It's now owned by Oracle .. does not play well with Salesforce. Cost was going up. reporting was challenging at first.

If you are using Salesforce, then stay away and go with something that integrates a lot easier. if you are using Oracle CRM, then this is the right decision for cusomter service.

Very quick to set up and very user friendly. Very very rich 'out of the box' Customer Service functionality - incident creation, queues, agent allocation etc. Probably the most feature-rich customer service app I have worked with. Also quite impressive email marketing functionality included. Powerful knowledge-base functionality.

Local install required for the agent console. Limited customisation options compared to Salesforce.com

If you have Customer Service specific requirements then RightNow is well worth looking at.