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RightNow Technologies Inc. will announce next Monday an upgrade of the live chat capabilities in version 5.5 of its flagship RightNow eService Center platform for online customer service.
Best known for its Web site customer self-service capabilities, Bozeman, Mont.-based RightNow is adding new features to make live chat more cost-effective for its customers, company officials said. The live chat capabilities are particularly useful to provide customers with pre-sales guidance, they added.
Chief among the new features in this release is support for threaded customer history across all customer communication channels, giving customer service representatives a view of the customers history from within the chat application. This version also supports Call center-style chat management and reporting so that customer service administrators have the same type of control over chat sessions as they have with incoming phone calls and e-mails in a call center.
Lastly, eService Center 5.5 provides color-coded alerts to ensure that customer service teams respond to customer chat requests within pre-set timeframes to comply with service-level agreements.
The software, which is used by most RightNow customers as a hosted service, is available today.