Existing Siebel users who sign up for a two-year contract will receive a 25% discount. Once it has got organizations onto its system the company is confident it will remain, based on its 90% customer retention rate. Customer retention is a major issue for hosted providers but so far RightNow is the only service supplier to publicly reveal its numbers.
Vendor migration programs tend to be marketing initiatives more than real business generators but they generally pull in a small number of the rival’s customers.
Siebel users have a lot of serious, nagging questions about product direction, support, and their long-term plans for CRM success, said Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow. Those questions will disappear when they become RightNow customers so we’re making it easier for them to make that decision.
RightNow originally offered service-centric CRM, which remains its core competency, but has also expanded into sales and marketing functionality and more innovative areas such as packaged CRM voice automation. Its business model includes hosted and on premise deployments but over 80% of its customers opt for hosting.
In a separate announcement the company said that communications operator Intelsat is dropping its Siebel sales automation implementation and replacing it with RightNow CRM because of RightNow’s ability to provide real time visibility into its sales pipeline. Intelsat is also taking RightNow Marketing and integration between the sales and marketing modules was a key factor. Both will be provided as hosted services.
