Friend Communications Standardizes Service, Sales and Marketing on RightNow CRM 7.0  (email this article)

RightNow® Technologies (Company Profile, Past Stories, Case Studies) (NASDAQ: RNOW), a leading provider of on demand CRM software solutions, today announced that Friend Communications, Inc has selected RightNow CRM™ 7.0 to standardize its customer service, sales and marketing applications. Friend Communications provides innovative online reservation system and related services that connect consumers with private RV parks and campgrounds in the U.S. Friend Communications is using RightNow CRM to effectively and efficiently manage business-to-business relationships with its RV park and campground businesses.

RightNow CRM is comprised of three applications built on a common base: RightNow Service™, an award-winning multi-channel customer service and support application; RightNow Sales™, a powerful sales force automation application; and RightNow Marketing™, a multi-channel marketing automation application. By delivering real-time, actionable customer insight across departments, RightNow CRM empowers mid-sized and Global 2000 organizations to grow revenue, strengthen customer loyalty and increase operational efficiency at every customer interaction.

“Since we’ve had such great results from using RightNow in our customer support department, it made good business sense to standardize our sales and marketing departments on RightNow CRM rather than using three separate systems that can’t talk to one another,” Deb Kohls, vice president of Business Development and Customer Support at Friend Communications, said. “In the past, our customer support staff had to go into the previous sales force automation application to manually update customer records, such as contract and implementation status, wasting an enormous amount of time. And our sales staff had no insight into customer service incidents. Standardizing on RightNow CRM provides us with a 360-degree view of the customer for our sales reps, customer support agents, marketing managers and senior executives.”

Friend Communications is using RightNow CRM in a business-to-business environment and has highly complex contract requirements that are unique to each RV park or campground business. Friend Communications has been able to easily customize RightNow Sales to meet these functional requirements. “We customized the Organization view tab within RightNow Sales so that it automatically pulls information such as contract type, contract date, service level agreement, payment status and contract renewal date. In fact, we use RightNow Sales as an ‘unofficial’ accounting system because we keep all the customer payment status information in the application,” Kohls added.

About Friend Communications, Inc.
Friend Communications was founded by business executives from the RV Industry who saw the need to provide a more efficient and productive business solution for the travel and leisure industries to manage their operations and conduct e-commerce via the internet. The company’s web-based product, ReservationFriend.com, addresses this need by providing a complete self-service, web-enabled solution for businesses to present themselves and transact commerce with “on-line” consumers.

Friend Communications provides superior marketplace technology services that connect consumers, businesses and partners within the leisure marketplace to enable increased visibility, new revenue opportunities, collective consumer information and improved efficiencies.

About RightNow Technologies, Inc.
RightNow (NASDAQ: RNOW) provides organizations with industry-leading on demand CRM solutions to build customer-focused businesses. RightNow’s acclaimed technology, comprehensive services and commitment to customer success deliver high returns on investment for its customers. More than 1,100 organizations worldwide use RightNow solutions including British Airways, British Telecom, Cisco Systems, Continental Tire North America, The Dow Chemical Company, John Deere, Nikon and the Social Security Administration. Founded in 1997, RightNow is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, with additional offices in North America, Europe and Asia. For further information, please visit www.rightnow.com.

RightNow is a registered trademark of RightNow Technologies, Inc. NASDAQ is a registered trademark of the NASDAQ Stock Market.

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