RightNow touts customer experience cloud platform

Customer experience firm RightNow Technologies is hoping to make it easier for enterprises to build applications and customer services in the cloud.

Specifically the firm wants to provide tools to create customer-facing and service applications, or add to and integrate existing ones.

RightNow seems to be turning its software over to a kind of app store, in this case the RightNow App Builder, and opening it up for use by developers looking to create tools that hook into its existing applications.

The RightNow CX Cloud Platform is made up of a number of elements which offer tools for creating and integrating customer experience applications.

This offers a range of custom objects from within the RightNow database schema, but this feature is not planned to be released until November.

Meanwhile, a Connect feature will let developers use open standards-based API features to add RightNow CX into "virtually" any kind of desktop app, backend or telephony system.

Design tools and examples should make the process of creating customer facing apps much simpler, the firm added.

Also part of the release is the RightNow Knowledge Foundation, which adds a "social" element to the proceedings by linking users and developers to peer information and people who can help them make better, more informed decisions when working within RightNow's schema, the firm claimed.

Lastly, RightNow has added Mission Critical Operations, a cloud delivery infrastructure with security and scalability features that should provide a consistent experience to end users.

"To deliver great customer experiences in today's complex and rapidly changing business landscape where consumers have the power and every interaction matters, organisations need a platform purpose built for customer experience," said David Vap, chief solutions officer at RightNow.

"RightNow is dedicated to helping our clients deliver exceptional customer experiences, and the RightNow CX Cloud Platform is the latest innovation we are delivering to achieve that goal."

Supporting the CX release is a Cloud Services Portal that RightNow customers can use to manage and monitor their cloud-based apps.

The company said that the portal can be used to check the health of any RightNow application, and that IT executives can analyse elements such as app bandwidth consumption and use.