[February 1, 2000]

RightNow Technologies Announces Fully Integrated Web Customer Service Suite

RightNow Technologies, a leading provider of Internet customer care systems, announced RightNow Web 3.1, a major upgrade to the company's flagship product suite. RightNow Web 3.1 builds upon the system's award-winning customer self-help capabilities by integrating new modules for e-mail management, live customer interaction and contracts management.

"RightNow Web 3.1 helps companies quickly deploy robust Web customer service systems, and is guaranteed to be fully implemented within 15 days," said Greg Gianforte, founder and CEO of RightNow Technologies. "Each module within RightNow Web 3.1 was built from the ground up to seamlessly interoperate with the other modules in the suite, making the suite's rich functionality easily accessible to customers and customer service professionals alike."

Separately today, RightNow Technologies announced that the company's customer base for RightNow Web has surpassed 500. RightNow Web's comprehensive functionality, ease-of-use and rapid implementation time have been key contributors to the system's rapid market acceptance.

"Web customer service has become essential Internet infrastructure for any business on the Web," said Christopher Hoffman, worldwide director of application solution services research at International Data Corp., based in Framingham, Mass. "RightNow Web 3.1 is a compelling product in this category because its integrated modules address the most important requirements of Web customer service automation."

RightNow Web's new modules are integrated with the product's award-winning, self-help knowledgebase. The new modules include RightNow E-mail, a natural language automated e-mail response and management system; RightNow Live, a live customer interaction utility; and RightNow Contracts, a utility for administering customer service contracts.

"We're committed to providing our customers the highest levels of customer service," said Chris Devou, service planning and development manager at Adaptec, a market leader in storage solutions and a powerful enabler of today's information age, based in Milpitas, Calif. "We first installed RightNow Web eight months ago, and it gave us the ability to deliver real-time dynamic solutions to our customers. The new features in RightNow Web 3.1 will allow us to further enhance our support offerings."

RightNow Web's self-help knowledgebase allows customers to easily find their own answers to questions. As customers interact with the system, the system learns to anticipate future questions.

For questions that are not addressed by the published knowledgebase, RightNow Web makes it easy for customers to submit a new question. When support personnel respond to the question, they can publish the question and the answer into the knowledgebase, thereby making the solution easily accessible to future visitors.

RightNow E-mail leverages RightNow's unique self-help knowledgebase to provide automatic e-mail responses to customer questions.

If a customer is unable to find the answer they seek in the self-help knowledgebase, they can send in an e-mail. RightNow E-mail's new SmartAssistant feature captures the e-mail and applies proprietary artificial intelligence and neural network technology to analyze the query. The system then either replies with a suggested list of solutions or routes it to the appropriate customer service representative based on message content. At the click of the mouse, customers can interact with hyperlinks contained within the e-mail to rate the effectiveness of the proposed answers. This information is captured by the system and used to increase the accuracy of future automated responses.

RightNow Live is 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.

RightNow 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. RightNow Live will help Web sites capture more revenues by lowering order abandonment rates and reducing customer frustration.

The RightNow Contracts module is designed for companies who provide service contracts to their customers. RightNow Contracts 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.

RightNow Web is now shipping. A complete implementation of RightNow Web ranges from $29,995 to $49,995 for a two-year license, and includes unlimited product updates and support. RightNow Web supports SQL databases such as Oracle8 and Oracle8i, and Microsoft SQL Server, and server operating systems such as Windows NT, Linux and Sun Solaris.

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