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RIGHT NOW TECHNOLOGIES ANNOUNCES RIGHT NOW WEB 3.0; UNVEILS STRATEGY TO CREATE INDUSTRY’S MOST COMPREHENSIVE INTERNET CUSTOMER CARE SOLUTION
World’s #1 Best Selling E-Service System Gains Important New Features and Functionality
BOZEMAN, MT (September 8, 1999) - Right Now Technologies today announced Right Now Web 3.0, a major upgrade to the world's number one best-selling e-service system. The product incorporates several new features that help companies rapidly deploy a successful Web-based customer service system. Right Now Technologies also today unveiled an aggressive six month product roadmap that will further expand the capabilities of Right Now Web, extending its lead as the industry's most comprehensive and effective e-service system.With an installed base of over 350 customers, Right Now Web is the world's best-selling Internet customer care system. The software helps Web-connected businesses dramatically improve the quality and responsiveness of their Internet customer support operations, while at the same time reducing support expenses.
“Most companies on the Web today do not deliver adequate e-service to their customers,” said Greg Gianforte, CEO of Right Now Technologies. “Over the last twelve months, we've installed more e-service systems than any other vendor, and we've had the opportunity to closely study what works and what doesn't. Right Now Web 3.0, combined with our aggressive product roadmap, provides a reliable and proven Internet customer care solution for any company.”
Right Now Web's "Organic" Knowledgebase Anticipates Customer Questions At the heart of Right Now Web 3.0 is an "organic" knowledgebase engine that is deceptively simple in its design yet powerful in its ability to automate online customer support operations.
Right Now Web operates under the principal that most customer questions are repetitive in nature, and can be predicted with great accuracy. The system works by presenting visitors with a dynamic selection of frequently asked questions (FAQs). As visitors interact with the system, they rate the effectiveness of published FAQs, causing useful solutions to be presented first for future customer questions. For questions that are not addressed by the published knowledgebase, Right Now Web makes it easy for customers to submit new questions. When support personnel respond to the questions, they can publish the question and the answer into the knowledgebase, thereby making the solution easily accessible to future visitors.
“Right Now Web helped us manage Caldera's dramatic business growth over the past year,” said Mark Carpenter, Manager of Technical Support at Caldera Systems, a leading Linux operating systems vendor based in Orem, Utah. “Our business continues to grow rapidly. In order to satisfy the support requirements of an exploding customer base, we chose to deploy Right Now Web. Right Now Web provides our customers immediate access to a dynamic knowledgebase of timely customer support information. The system has enabled us to deliver a consistently high level of customer service as we've grown.”
Right Now Web is the first Internet customer care system to leverage real-world customer input to anticipate future customer questions. Right Now's unique Organic Knowledgebase Engine represents a marked departure from most other customer support systems which impose unnecessary complexity into the knowledgebase management processes. Right Now Web's elegantly simple design enables rapid deployment and exceptional ease of use and flexibility.
Right Now Web 3.0 Offers New E-Service Modules and Dozens of New Features
Right Now Web 3.0 is the first deliverable in Right Now's ambitious product roadmap. Right Now Web 3.0 incorporates four major new modules, as well as dozens of other useful feature enhancements. The new modules include a natural language auto email response system called Right Now Email?; an automated customer satisfaction survey called Right Now Surveys?; a service contract administration module called Right Now Contracts?; and expanded multi-lingual product support for French, German and British English.
In October, Right Now will introduce Right Now Live?, a customer interaction utility that supports real-time chat and telephony integration. In December, Right Now will introduce Right Now SDK?, a software development kit that helps customers integrate Right Now Web's organic knowledgebase engine into other home grown and third party applications.
“Right Now is delivering pragmatic solutions for Internet customer care,” said Rick Lowe, Vice President of Customer Service and Support at Infonent.com, the parent company for WebJump (http://www.webjump.com), a leading provider of web hosting services. “Right Now Web allows our 10-person support staff to provide extremely responsive service to our 498,000 customers. With any other solution, we'd be unable to support so many customers with so few support personnel. Right Now Technologies has outlined a smart product roadmap that will provide us a fully integrated suite of best-of-breed e-service solutions. We've evaluated the leading point solutions on the market today for email management and live support and found them to be sorely lacking, not only in their standalone features but also in their inability to integrate within a common management framework. The new Right Now Web offerings will certainly fill a real void in the market.”
Right Now Email First to Combine Organic Knowledgebase and Auto Email Response
Right Now Email combines Right Now's unique organic knowledgebase architecture with advanced artificial intelligence to provide automatic email responses to customer questions. When a customer is unable to find an answer to their question in the public knowledgebase, they can send an email to the support department.
Right Now Email then intercepts the customer's email, analyzes keywords and phrases within the customer's query, acknowledges receipt of the question, and provides likely answers to the question. Once the visitor receives a response, they can rate the usefulness of the recommended solutions by clicking on a hyperlink, which automatically captures the information. The information is then used to predict the solution's relevance to future questions.
“We have evaluated email management solutions from other vendors, but have been waiting for an integrated solution,” continued Caldera's Mark Carpenter. “Right Now's new Right Now Email module is a product we are excited about. We will seriously consider deploying it here at Caldera.”
Right Now Surveys Automates Service Contract Administration The Right Now Surveys module is designed for companies who provide service contracts to their customers. Right Now Surveys allows these companies to manage customer support contracts either by incident or by expiration dates, and deliver support accordingly. When a user has exhausted their current service contract, they are automatically prompted to renew the contract prior to submitting their next service request.
Right Now Web 3.0 Supports Multiple Languages
Right Now Web 3.0's interface, user navigation screens and help instructions now support multiple languages, with versions for French, German and British English. Right Now Web also includes a language translation utility for customers who want to support other languages. Right Now Technologies will incorporate support for additional major European and Asian languages throughout the next twelve months.
Right Now to Launch Right Now Live in October
In October, Right Now will introduce Right Now Live, a Java-based customer interaction utility that allows customers to launch live chat sessions with a support representative, or initiate an instant telephone call. The utility also allows the support representative to remotely control the customer's viewable Web page.
Right Now Live is especially useful in pre-sales situations. According to a recent survey by industry research firm Jupiter Communications, 67% of online transactions are abandoned. Right Now Live will help Web sites capture more revenues by lowering order abandonment rates. Right Now Technologies to Introduce Right Now SDK in December In December, Right Now will introduce Right Now SDK, a software development kit. Right Now SDK contains APIs and libraries for corporate software developers and systems integrators who wish to integrate Right Now's organic knowledgebase engine with other applications, such as customer relationship management systems (CRM), ecommerce systems, accounting systems and decision support systems.
Right Now Technologies Unveils Aggressive Product Roadmap
Right Now Technologies' product roadmap calls for the company to introduce several new products and features over the next six months, which will culminate in the creation of a portal-class Internet customer care system. The system will support over 20 million unique customer interactions per day and offer a complete lineup of essential e-service capabilities, such as Web self-help, proactive email management, automated email response, live customer support interaction, computer telephony integration and sales automation.
“Our customer research indicates that most companies approach e-service automation with the intent to reduce support costs,” added Greg Gianforte. “While Right Now Web is proven to reduce support expenses by between 25% and 80%, the system also often increases revenues for our clients. This is because Right Now Web increases visitor interaction with the site, and many visitors are searching for information that supports a purchase decision. The implication - and few other Web site operators realize this - is that e-service is also a pre-sales function. With this in mind, we will introduce additional features in Year 2000 which will further extend Right Now Web's ability to help companies capture more revenues.”
Right Now Web Roadmap Summary
Following is a summary of current and future Right Now Web features:
| Product/Capability | Description | Ship Date |
| Right Now Web 3.0 | Complete integrated eservice system for Web sites | This month |
| Right Now Contracts | Tracks service contracts associated with Web-based support | This month |
| Right Now Surveys | Automatically tracks customer satisfaction by product and customer service representative. | This Month |
| Right Now Email | Automatically responds to e-mail based on natural language search of organic knowledge. | This Month |
| Right Now Live | Best of breed live customer interaction system, featuring real-time chat and telephony. | October, 1999 |
| Right Now SDK | Enables software developers to integrate Right Now’s organic knowledgebase engine into other third party applications | December, 1999 |
| Right Now Sales | Module to bridge eservice and esales. | Q1, 2000 |
| Right Now Web 3.X | Expanded language support (Kanji Doublebyte, etc) and customer generated enhancements. | Q1-Q4, 2000 |
Pricing and Availability
Right Now Web 3.0 ships this month, and is priced at $19,500 for a two year subscription license, which includes free monthly product updates and unlimited technical support. The Right Now Email?, Right Now Surveys?, and Right Now Contracts? modules ship this month, and are priced at $10,000 each for a two year subscription license. Right Now Live? ships in November and Right Now SDK? ships in December. Pricing for Right Now Live and Right Now SDK has not been set. Right Now Technologies provides an optional hosting option, in which a company's Right Now Web site is co-located at Right Now's offices.
About Right Now Technologies
Founded in 1997, Right Now Technologies automates customer service and technical support operations for Internet-connected organizations. The Company's flagship product, Right Now Web, guarantees to reduce the Web-based customer support expenses of Internet-connected organizations by at least 25%, while dramatically improving the quality and responsiveness of support. Right Now Technologies' customers include Turner Network Television, PictureTel, TDK, Vivitar, Nortel and over 350 other organizations. Right Now Technologies is located at 601 Haggerty Drive, Bozeman, MT 59715, and can be reached by phone at 888-322-3566, by fax at 406-522-4227, by email at info@rightnowtech.com, or on the Web at http://www.rightnowtech.com.
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Editorial Contact:
Mark Coker/Maile Spinola
Dovetail Public Relations
(408) 395-3600
mark@dovetailpr.com
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