RightNow Technologies has refuted claims from rival hosted CRM vendor salesforce.com that it has created the world’s first Knowledge as a Service platform.
Salesforce.com’s updated customer service platform, called Service Cloud 2, contains several features that aim to enable a company to improve its knowledge base by sourcing information from its user community.
As reported by CBR yesterday, “Service Cloud 2 offers what salesforce.com claims to be the first Knowledge as a Service offering, a hosted database of crowd-sourced hints, tips and best practice information.”
However, in a blog post on RightNow’s website, David Vap, VP of products at the company, disputed the claims.
“In reality, RightNow introduced a powerful, patented, self-learning knowledge base, delivered as a service, in 1997,” he wrote. “The RightNow knowledge base is not new; it has a track record of success.”
Vap added that clients such as Black & Decker, Electronic Arts, Nikon, Ben & Jerry’s and British Airways had been using the platform for many years.
“Our 1,900 clients around the globe have used the RightNow knowledge base to facilitate more than 6 billion customer interactions (that is everyone in North America counted 20 times!),” he said.
“The spin and half-truths is enough to force the engineer in me to write a blog post,” Vap said. “When will the software industry start holding itself accountable to the levels of accuracy and truthfulness that every other industry is held to?”
