After RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte gave his company update and thoughts on why customer experience is going to have a major play in many businesses’ strategies moving forward here at the RightNow Summit 2008, Vice President of Products David Vap took the stage to take the crowd on a road trip through the company’s product offerings this year as well as a glimpse into the future.

Vap explained that there are several trends that “consistently bubble to the top” amidst conversations and observations from analysts, competitors, customers, engineering, and the sales team:

• offering a multichannel choice, which Vap admitted isn’t new — adding companies have been working on this for the past decade — but cited extreme customer demand as the continued driver;
• service is the new sales, he explained his company continues to look for ways to help customer service organizations influence revenue;
• proactive customer care, which has the ability to “head off a lot of cost and pain” according to Vap;
• augmentation of traditional agents, which he assured software-as-a-service (SaaS) is well positioned for since many contact centers are now becoming niche and spread out globally; and
• the growing communication, influence, and power of consumers themselves.

These trends, along with the four pillars RightNow fervently abide by, drive the products Vap’s team designs.

Vap added the company is committed to delivering the same quarterly release cycle as this year (February, May, August, and November)–which is the beauty of the SaaS model in his eyes. “We don’t expect you to follow [the release schedule] because you should upgrade when it’s best for you,” he told the crowd.

I had the chance to have a follow-up conversation with Vap here at The Broadmoor, the site for this year’s summit, and I asked him about the biggest obstacle he and his team face in the product realm. He explains that many companies may want to jump ahead of the release cycle and customize their current RightNow offering.

That in itself isn’t the problem, according to Vap. It’s when the customizations are available out-of-the-box in ta future release and the companies jumping the gun want the productized version to then be migrated immediately to their solution that the issues begin. “There’s no direct way to do that,” he laments.

In a sense, this could be both a blessing and curse for SaaS. On the one hand, you don’t have to upgrade with each new release (RightNow keeps the releases generally and fully supported for 24 months). Vap even admits that would be virtually impossible for large enterprises, as they would have to continually retrain and get used to new functionality every few months. So there’s some flexibility and wiggle room there.

That said, if companies want to join the early adopter train and customize to the hilt, they may run into trouble when the upcoming releases have their “specially tailored” functionality right out-of-the-box, since there’s no straight-and-narrow path to forging the two sides together — at least in RightNow’s case.

The best way to try and avoid this problem, though, isn’t to forgo any customization or innovation. “We love getting customer feedback, even criticism, because it makes our product better,” Vap explains. “We’ll work with our clients to figure out the best way to tackle specific business needs.”

For others carrying the SaaS flag, is this a common problem you face as well? How do you handle trying to stay ahead while at the same time waiting (maybe not-so) patiently to see what is coming down the pike in the next quarterly release?