Gianforte's eight-step programme

RightNow boss Greg Gianforte has revealed his eight rules for improving customer relationships in business, with the intention of creating the fabled 360-degree view of the customer.

By Chris Middleton

Gianforte – who is enjoying his new 'roaming' sales-generation role, which has seen him visit 160 new customers this year – said in an exclusive interview that he has found several themes emerging during his years in business.

Gianforte has broken his findings down into a new customer handbook called 'Eight to Great', which he says forms "the DNA of RightNow and the organisation". (Indeed, each of RightNow's field execs have been certified on these rules.)

Gianforte's eight steps begin at ground level in the enterprise: first, if the organisation cannot answer the phone or emails properly (what he terms offering "food and shelter"), because agents lack basic information, then it will be unable to help its customers. "The first step is to have a knowledge foundation," he says.

"You can't deliver the customer experience if you don't know what the customer is thinking."

Greg Gianforte, RightNow

The next step is to expose that knowledge to everyone, so that the consumer can help themselves – via web self-service portals, for example.

By answering the most common questions here, Gianforte claims that 30-50% of emails and contact centre calls disappear, freeing up capacity to deal with more serious problems.

The next stage in upgrading the customer experience is to empower the call centre as well as the customer, by way of an improved agent desktop environment. Unsurprisingly, Gianforte believes that one way to do this is to abandon systems such as Siebel.

Once these initial steps are taken, then the enterprise can begin to increase customer expectations by adding choice and chat. "The consumer expects that there is a history of earlier conversations and emails," he says, and an integrated link between the customer and the correspondence trail.

The next two steps are perhaps the hardest: anticipate what the customer is thinking, and use the audit trail of choices and queries to inform the relationship in future. "You can't deliver the customer experience if you don't know what the customer is thinking," he says.

This needs to be followed by the design of seamless links and new product or service introductions.

The goal of the first six steps, says Gianforte, is the seventh: proactive service. "Most organisations wait for the customer to show up on a stretcher in the hospital," he says, smiling. To prevent 'emergency room treatment' the enterprise should know, and be able to anticipate, each customer's spikes in demand.

The last step in Gianforte's 'Eight to Great' programme is to offer continuous improvement, he suggests, sharing best practices. "Use this framework to win over clients and build lasting relationships," he says.

So why are so many companies getting it so wrong? One answer is that some companies, such as Amazon, are getting it so right, which raises the bar of what customers expect from every company.

Camera companies, he says, are a good example of how the metrics of customer interactions have changed, thanks to the internet. "Once upon a time you bought a luxury SLR costing a thousand of dollars from a main street store," he says, "and you had a direct relationship with the guy selling it to you. Now you can buy it for a few hundred dollars off the internet.

"What this means is that the cost of the item itself has gone down, but the cost of serving the customer has gone up. So you can't throw more humans at the problem [of customer service] when the cost of the item you're selling has gone down."

So what you have to do, he says, is make the contact centre and online experience seamless, much better informed, and more closely tuned into the customer's buying history, preferences, and queries.

Particularly now, as the economy slows into a more serious recession than many had predicted, "a bad customer experience results in an early death," he says.

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