Oracle MightNow FightNow with RightNow

So Oracle have bought RightNow. Ahh, RightNow. Memories. See my proud certificate to become RightNow certified. Not many people can say that. The RightNow approach to wooing partners to implement their product was far removed from Salesforce.com, possibly explaining why it is seen as more of a niche product with not much of a partner ecosystem.

My experience in 2008 was one of being an extension to their in house Professional Services at the Euro HQ in Maidenhead. The training I was given by the PS guys there was second to none, and it was clear there was a passion not only for the product, but for 'best practice' in implementation. To this day I have never received better training in a product.

From a technical point of view, having come from a Siebel background, the thing that struck me was the speed of configuration (and of course 'no hardware'). In a similar way to Salesforce, UI and data model changes were very fast to implement. There were also very powerful routing, escalation and knowledge base elements too. The best way I can describe it is a set of service contact centre building blocks, with rafts of 'configuration settings' to turn functionality on and off. This, as opposed to the 'prettified database tables but not much else' approach of some apps. What this resulted in was incredible value, incredibly fast. The whole application, including web knowledge base could be set up in as little as a week or two. Longer timelines would apply for integration/migration etc as usual, but that takes the same amount of time regardless of SaaS/On-Premise/Cloud/whatever.

When compared to Salesforce, Oracle CRM OnDemand or Siebel, the Service functionality RightNow had back THEN was superior to what those platforms have in this area NOW. It frustrates me when certain products are hell-bent on bells-and-whistles before they have got the basics right. Get the internals of routing/knowledgebase/escalation/workload management etc right FIRST, then dabble with Twitter and Facebook. Or you could just do nothing. Ever. As per Siebel.

In 3 years since I last saw RightNow it will only have improved, so it is no surprise that Oracle have come in for them. Oracle CRM OnDemand is woeful in the Contact Centre area, Gartner do not even see it as a player. Salesforce charge separately for their Knowledgebase (crazy) and are somewhere over there in Social Fairyland (though they acquired Assistly which looks good), and I would need to ask my Grandad about Siebel.

What does confuse me though is what the next step for Oracle is. I would expect it to be an extension of their Fusion applications, but are they going to skin/integrate it as such or leave it as-is?  Kate Leggett has just done a great blog post on this topic, including an important point about the culture of the two companies. Oracle is a lumbering behemoth of a company, RightNow has been known as agile, friendly, well quite modern really. Cool. When I was there they had free cans of pop in the fridge. For instance.

What I can conclude, is that this is the first time Oracle have managed to position themselves with a superior offering to Salesforce in the SaaS space. You want an SFA solution? Go to Salesforce. You want an extendable enterprise platform? Go to Salesforce. You want a best practice, pre-built Customer Service Solution? Now at last you can consider going to Oracle.

iPhone 4S, Knight Rider, and refusal of Siri to talk dirty.

Regardless of the murmurings of disappointment regarding the iPhone 4S release, I was always going to get one to replace my 3GS, just makes sense. In fact the tide is turning now and everyone is saying, along with IOS5, that in fact, all is fine, all is still great with Apple. 

So, after wading through a few reviews, I swallowed my pride and the day after release joined a queue of equally keen people on Oxford Street outside the O2 shop. This really did look quite sad, and indeed I was trying to pretend that I was 'just looking in the window', but it didn't fly. Even random passers by were asking me 'what is the queue for'? I was tempted to say that David Beckham was doing a book signing in there or something, but I just told them straight: 'We are all spending our Saturday queuing for a mobile phone'. Actually, the queue was not that long, which kind of made it worse as we looked like the dregs who could not manage to get it on the actual release day. Anyway, I stood firm, I didn't care. After all, I was only hours away from being able to talk 'with' my phone so how cool would I be by the end of the day!

Anyway, after a reasonable 20 mins of queuing I was led inside the shop by a very professional O2 person, and inside to my surprise was a further waiting room of 6 more people. It was like being in a doctors with an L-Shaped couch and some iPhone accessories on a table for you to muse over buying. You know, cases for £12.99, well worth paying for what equates to a bit of rubber. 

Anyway, I finally got my call and sat down opposite a sales guy who said 'what would you like'? I thought about trying to be funny and surprising him, but I gave the stock answer "4S, black, 16gb". "And that bit of rubber over there I suppose". Then after a bit of chat about my favourite football team I got the phone. Brilliant. Back home for setup........

Setup was super easy, restored from my 3GS. I was already familiar with the main IOS5 functions and quirks having installed it on the 3GS. Basically to get everything to work amounts to ensuring you do the following things :

-iCloud Backup - both on your phone AND on iTunes when you connect your phone, then synch in iTunes and all subsequent backups will be via iCloud.

-Work out what gets backed up to iCloud - Settings, contacts, apps, SOME photos (last 1000 in the 'Photo Stream' thing), Apps and Songs can be re-downloaded on demand, but not movies, or podcasts....takes a bit of working out.

-Siri - off by default on the phone so needs switching on, more about that in a bit

-Contacts - looked like they were deleted on my phone but switching iCloud option for them off then on sorted that

-Auto iTunes store downloads - off by default, needed turning on in the settings

-Podcasts had disappeared - this whole change does not have much respect for podcasts - still need to manually synch

Anyway - most improvements of the 4S and IOS5 are quite incremental, but the most interesting is of course Siri. I have a huge grumble about the fact that we still need to use keyboards, it is such as legacy tool and not very well suited to mobile devices. So I think this is the first step towards a big progression away. Will take some time, but I would expect keyboards to be gone in about 10-15 years.

On the night of purchase I did the standard thing of asking it random questions. There is loads of that on the web now, I just tried 'Can you talk dirty to me' and it responded 'I can't, I'm as clean as the driven snow'. Nice.

I then tried a few more useful things (generally it supports requests related to 'standard' Apple apps):

-Text Messages: 'Text Michelle Procter, Hello Michelle I am texting this from Siri'. Effective and probably faster for short texts, propensity for errors increases if you try longer ones

-Emails: No-go for me, need to have email addresses in my address book. I use gmail so they are all stored there so not much use

-Creating appointments / reminders: Works well. You can also say 'what appointments do I have this afternoon' etc and it will list them.

-Facts: Good for facts: "Who is the president of the United States", or "what is ten divided by three".

-Music: Probably faster using Siri to play individual songs that you know the name of: "Play Better Than Today by Kylie" worked perfectly
-Directions / local information / traffic - Siri admits to you that this only works in the US (via Yelp integration). Hopefully they will sort this out in the UK soon, am sure they will.

-Anything it doesn't know: It defaults to a web search generally. Some things like asking it to 'Tweet' it acknowledges it cannot 'Tweet' but I would expect that at some point.

It is a good start. And ok if you are by yourself. Kind of. But what about if you are in public? I wonder how long it will take before this is acceptable in public without looking like an idiot. I tried it walking down the street in Shadwell, and although you can kind of mask it by holding your phone to your ear to pretend it is a call, the way you speak to Siri is certainly not like you would talk to a human. It's very stop-start and 'clipped'. I tried 'Create reminder for 2pm: Put the rubbish out' and 'Change reminder for 2pm' etc while walking past and opposite people in the street. You just get funny looks. 

I think the only person to help with this is David Hasselhoff based on his experience in Knight Rider! I have 'met' him before (bottom pic) and am sure he will remember me from that 2006 book signing (his book, not mine). So I have tweeted him:

The Tweet:

@DavidHasselhoff I have just got my iPhone 4S and it is voice controlled. Any tips for making talking to a computer publicly acceptable?

I am sure any tips The Hoff has for this will be much appreciated by 4S owners and will update this blog post should I get a reply, which of course must only be seconds away :-)