Sydney (24 June, 2008) — RightNow® Technologies (NASDAQ: RNOW), today announced that BT Business is rolling out RightNow Chat™ to empower contact centre agents to instantly respond to customer queries via its BT Business’ help and support website: www.bt.com/business/help/webchat

RightNow Chat can help improve contact centre productivity by enabling BT Business agents to serve several customers at a time through simultaneous chat sessions.  Agents will also be able to immediately respond to commonly asked questions by using ‘hot-keys’, which provide standard answers, freeing them from repeatedly typing similar responses.  If needed, they can escalate queries to a team of specialist support agents. If a customer has a complex issue, he or she can grant permission to an agent to remotely assist and share the customer’s computer screen for instant incident resolution.

An alternative to self-serving via the web, emailing or calling into the contact centre, the chat facility provides an additional interaction channel for customers through which they can receive an instant response. Also, during online interactions customers can continue with other tasks like making a phone call for example.  Once a chat session is completed, customers can print the conversation for future reference or ask for an email summary.

In addition, the RightNow Chat feature will help BT Business to capture the voice of the customer by offering a short survey to customers on completion of a chat session. Survey results will enable BT Business to make improvements to further enhance the overall customer experience.

“By adding RightNow Chat to our existing e-service channels we are offering BT Business Broadband and Email customers a popular way of communicating instantly with us,” said Nick Witte-Vermeulen, Online Support Manager, BT Business. “We can now provide multi-channel support for our Broadband and Email customers, so they can contact us via the channel they are most comfortable with. Initial feedback is very positive and customers comment they prefer it to the phone for certain types of enquiry, because they can multitask better. We also gather feedback on our service via chat, so we can strive to provide a better customer experience offering.”

BT Business will also use RightNow to track the types of questions asked via chat and ensure that popular questions are always included in the self-service area of the BT.com site, which should reduce the number of repetitive questions coming into the contact centre, freeing agents to provide personalised assistance with more complex issues.    

About BT
BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries.  Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to our customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services.  BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.
 
In the year ended 31 March 2008, BT Group plc’s revenue was £20,704 million with profit before taxation and specific items of £2,506 million.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group.  BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.  

For more information, visit www.bt.com/aboutbt
 

About RightNow Technologies
RightNow (NASDAQ: RNOW) delivers the high-impact technology solutions and services organisations need to cost-efficiently deliver a consistently superior customer experience across their frontline service, sales and marketing touch-points. Approximately 1,800 corporations and government agencies worldwide depend on RightNow to achieve their strategic objectives and better meet the needs of those they serve. RightNow is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. For more information, please visit www.rightnow.com

RightNow is a registered trademark of RightNow Technologies, Inc. NASDAQ is a registered trademark of the NASDAQ Stock Market.