The Market

As customers turn to more channels to reach companies, companies providing customer case management solutions have struggled to accommodate them. According to a “Social Media for Support” survey conducted by John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), only one third of companies currently create incidents for issues reported via social media. “We need to see more incident management platforms consolidate to offer multiple channels, but we also need more APIs provided to plug together common knowledge management and multichannel platforms,” Ragsdale says.

Newer cloud tools may be easier to use, but they’re also lightweight. “They don’t support complex entitlements or automated renewals,” Ragsdale says, “without major customizations or bolting on a third-party product—a big stumbling block for B2B support.” These clients need automated dashboards that can handle customers with multiple products with different service-level agreements (SLAs), he says. He envisions analytics information to predict renewals, as well as the ability for an employee to see which SLAs are soon to expire.

The Leaders

Oracle’s highest scores were for depth of functionality; it received an overall score of 4.6. “Oracle’s RightNow capabilities are a strong competitor in the marketplace, particularly for firms wanting to streamline service and support to enable agents to handle multiple support channels,” Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, says. Meanwhile, “[Oracle] Siebel remains the gold standard for CRM, with deep vertical-specific versions and infinite flexibility. The upfront costs may be high compared to a cloud tool, but the customization and integration capabilities allow companies to embrace innovative processes, not dumb them down due to system inflexibility,” Ragsdale explains. Michael Maoz, vice president and Gartner distinguished analyst, voices one caveat. The “cloud is not dominant in new sales for case management,” he notes, despite the growing market preference for it.

For last year’s Service Awards, Wettemann identified Parature as a “good acquisition target”; less than a year later, Microsoft snapped up the fast-growing company. “Parature was the first multichannel/incident management platform to offer a fully integrated customer community and social media monitoring,” Ragsdale says, anticipating that it “will be a big asset to Microsoft Dynamics.” Parature has solid scores across the board, reflecting the company’s excellence at serving midmarket customers feature-rich customer case management at a low cost, according to analysts.

Salesforce.com took a step down the podium this year, but remains a leader. It had the highest score for company direction (4.6) and a pair of 3.9s, one each for customer satisfaction and depth of functionality. Salesforce.com benefits from being part of a larger CRM ecosystem, with a “platform vision that takes it to a usage far beyond traditional CRM,” says Kate Leggett, principal analyst at Forrester Research. However, in this specific category, Maoz cautions that “Salesforce.com is not proven in most parts of the world as a scalable B2C case management system.” Ragsdale notes that it’s “still missing key capabilities for success in the B2B world, including complex entitlement support and automated contract renewals.” Its lowest score, 3.3, was in the cost category. Salesforce.com is “getting expensive over five years,” notes Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group. Still, Salesforce.com is “the top installed incident management solution for TSIA members,” Ragsdale reports.

The Winner

Microsoft Dynamics CRM grabbed the top spot from Salesforce.com, which led the market the last two years. The acquisition of Parature was on the minds of many of the analysts, who gave Microsoft Dynamics a score of 4.4 for company direction. The company is “showing up on short lists for large enterprise support deals for the first time,” Ragsdale says. “The acquisition of Parature shows Microsoft is taking service seriously, instead of investing only in sales and marketing, as most cloud CRM vendors tend to do,” he says. Prior to the acquisition, Leggett noted that Microsoft Dynamics CRM was “missing core multichannel capabilities and knowledge management, which it addresses with partnerships [Moxie and Parature].” Parature will fill in some of those gaps in capabilities. It’s also “one of the least expensive solutions in the marketplace,” Leggett says.   —Sarah Sluis

ONE TO WATCH

As a large, established company, SAP has had “to live down legacy customer complaints,” Greenberg says, “though to its credit, it actively interacts with customers more than almost any other company. Its biggest problem is being unclear on its direction.” That direction may come in the form of SAP HANA, “and being able to leverage big data for more predictive, proactive customer service,” states Vicki Jenkins, a customer management services outsourcing analyst at NelsonHall. “We’ve really only seen the tip of the iceberg.”   —S.S