Paul,
Excellent post, and I can concur with what you are saying.
To some extent, I feel like a battered spouse sometimes with their marketing efforts. Remember when CRM was all that and eService was not worth focusing on? They changed their message, put down eService in favor of a complete suite, retooled, etc. Some time later, they went back to eService (when CRM did not work as expected) and to regain their leadership in that market -- this is what they do, this is what they are good at, this is where they should focus on.
From my perspective RNOW has a tremendous product for one specific use case -- and it saddens me when they try to shy away from it, especially when the areas where they try to go are not areas where they can differentiate. Their challenge is not to find the next "hot" area for marketing, it is to grow into larger implementations and grow revenue in the market in which they excel.
This is not the place to argue this, and of course they will come back and point to implementations they have where they are already doing large contact centers. Alas, my argument is this: there are roughly $2BB in licenses in customer service floating around the world, growing consistently between 2-4% every year. As long as large contact centers will continue to have clients, this market will continue to grow adding new features and new solutions.
I am going to be generous and say RNOW has $200MM in total revenues (probably less, they are a public company so the info is available if i am wrong -- the argument still stands).
Finally, there is no market for Customer Experience -- sorry, we tried this 8+/- years ago and we realized that it is not software that is necessary for organizations to do Customer Experience Management (all the vendors that had tried to call themselves CEM are long gone).
So, my argument is -- wouldn't it benefit them to focus on what they do really well, try to grow from roughly 10% of the market to 25-30% of the market, maybe more, instead of trying to create a market where there is no market to be created?
I don't know, sometimes, as I said, I feel like the battered spouse here -- I keep standing by them, in spite of what they do...
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