March 1, 2013
By Leonard Klie, Editor, CRM magazine and SmartCustomerService.com

Oracle Releases RightNow Cloud Service Update

Oracle this week unveiled the February 2013 release of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service, which includes new features designed to increase community engagement and improve message relevancy with customers and employees and new ROI reporting tools to increase online revenue and customer satisfaction.

Some of the new functionalities added to this latest version include the following:

Message Template Designer, which dynamically displays content based on the specific record filters defined for that message. Users can further brand incident responses with the specific logo or treatment aligned to the message, while maintaining the uniform incident template structure.
The Mobile Agent App, a native application designed specifically for the iPad. It offers an intelligent offline cache that provides improved response time when displaying data and automatically updates when more recent data exists on the server.
Customer Portal Framework Extensions, with improvements to the extension wizard for better guidance on writing more efficient, impactful code, updated online help, and a highly intuitive visual interface that allows users to track the update status of widget versions and have granular control of which versions to use and when.
Engagement Engine, which allows users to intelligently engage with online customers. With more than 70 built-in rules and conditions, users can proactively and reactively manage entry points according to business need, monitor Web sessions to target high-value customers, and dynamically insert content and trigger events. Engagement Engine also provides dynamic delivery of chat assistance and offers based on online behaviors.
Chat ROI Reporting to track and measure online conversion rates, average order value, and click-through rates.
Policy Automation, which uses natural language processing to transform complex policy documents into dynamic Web site interfaces.
Social Community Management with "Sticky Posts" to highlight important content so it remains visible at the top of lists, and "Private Message Management" so community managers can limit unwanted messages.
Engage - Survey Expiration Options to ensure that the value of insights collected from surveys are timely, manageable, and actionable.
Cloud Service - Open Integration and Extensibility with a robust set of public APIs that support even richer enterprise integration scenarios and expand the data model coverage.

The company said the new release will help businesses increase efficiency, improve transparency of decisions to customers, and reduce follow-ups with automatically generated audit reports that document each step of the decision process, enhance customer satisfaction by only asking contextually relevant questions and providing timely, accurate answers that apply to the customer's circumstance, and faster response to business changes in policies, legislation, and pricing through updates that can now be managed by business users through a single source document, which gets automatically deployed to the Web.

"With the latest release of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service, organizations can rapidly respond to customer needs and fast-changing business policies," said David Vap, group vice president of products at Oracle, in a statement. "Whether public or private sector, policy automation within Oracle RightNow Cloud Service helps organizations more easily support their policy strategies by simplifying policy creation, maintenance, auditing, and self-service access. These capabilities help to reduce operational costs while at the same time providing a consistent, transparent experience for the customer."