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Redrawing the boundaries of customer service

THE OPPORTUNITY The Power of Customer Conversations Satisfaction is redrawing the boundaries of customer service by cultivating open communication with and among customers. In contrast to the closed interaction of email and CRM, Satisfaction alleviates the burden of customer support by harnessing customer involvement increasingly visible on blogs, forums and online communities. We’re building inexpensive but effective on-demand customer service tools for the small business market, a market that has never had access to the right tools before.

SUMMARY Who we are We know how to build and sell companies, from Thor’s sale of Prophet to Frog Design to Lane’s sale of Measure Map to Google. With Rubyred Labs, founded in 2006, we designed and developed a half-dozen commercial Web apps, and launched Valleyschwag, a surprise hit. Lane spent six years doing product development for startups at Adaptive Path. We have seen a lot of web products and business plans over the years. This is the business we’re betting the farm on.

THE PROBLEM Traditional customer service is unsatisfactory Customer service has long been a painful experience for companies and their customers. Current tools reinforce this, focusing on cold efﬁciency at the expense of personal touch: agent troubleshooting, knowledge bases, and trouble ticket queueing. This approach is labor intensive and time consuming. It is unwieldy for large businesses and inappropriate for small ones.

THE PROBLEM Email embodies the current problem Most small businesses today rely on email (e.g. MSOutlook) to Information Overload! respond to their customer issues. Always behind in responding Email makes it difﬁcult to track resolution and exacerbates the repetitive drudgery of Out of sight, out of mind traditional customer service.

OUR SOLUTION Replace the Contact page on every business site Give customers the answers they seek before they send email with live search of conversations Companies never answer the same question twice with Satisfaction. It learns from their interaction with and between customers.

OUR SOLUTION Companies and communities work together Customers themselves become a rich source of solutions, ideas and enthusiasm. Customer questions and employee answers are publicly viewable and easily ﬁndable. Satisfaction reﬂects customer feelings, as well as topics of concern.

OUR SOLUTION Satisfaction: a new model for customer service Satisfaction is a subscription-based Web application for small- to medium-sized businesses that redeﬁnes customer support as an open conversation between a company and its customers rather than a closed silo managed via email or CRM software. Satisfaction leverages the power of Web-based community to let customers answer each other’s questions directly, while also helping companies provide personal responses without dedicated personnel. Satisfaction beneﬁts from customers’ desire to identify and involve themselves with companies that matter to them, turning the experience of customer service from one that revolves around “trouble” to one that focuses on connection.

PRODUCT BENEFITS What can Satisfaction do for small business? Satisfaction decreases the time, effort, and costs associated with providing personalized customer service. By bringing customer expertise into the picture, Satisfaction reduces the number of repetitive support queries while engendering a range of new conversations between a company and its customers. This allows companies not only to reduce support costs but, more importantly, leverage participation to improve customer loyalty, identify passionate evangelists, and get the beneﬁt of customers’ involvement to aid sales, marketing, and product development efforts.

MARKET TRENDS The success of Satisfaction rides on three accelerating market trends

MARKET TREND 1 Customers are talking to one another online Increasingly, customers start their search for answers or conversation at the Google search bar. And more often than not, they end up on a site created by other customers. Blogs, online bulletin boards, and other community tools enable wide-ranging discussion about all aspects of a company or industry. Customers looking for support and assistance regarding a product often get better and more up-to-date information from these community-created sites than they do from the company’s own Web site.

MARKET TREND 1 Customers are talking to one another online “A lone person today has a greater chance to create widespread excitement or disrupt a company’s reputation without the assistance of the big megaphones of traditional media. And thanks to Google, a lone person can create a multi-layered impression of a moment in time for thousands, if not millions of other people to read and absorb immediately, months or years from now...The funnel of the message megaphone is a lot wider.” - Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, 2007.

MARKET TREND 2 Companies are seeing the financial benefits of engaging directly with customers “The benefits of courting customer advocates are clear. Research by Bain & Co. over the past decade has found that revenues of companies with the highest levels of customer loyalty grew more than twice as fast as those of their competitors... Says Robert Schieffer, professor of marketing at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management: ‘Increasing customer satisfaction has a remarkable impact on profitability and stock market performance.’ ” – “True Believers,” BusinessWeek, Winter 2006 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_52/b4015401.htm

MARKET TREND 2 Companies are seeing the financial benefits of engaging directly with customers “The most intensely engaged users of a product often find new ways to enhance it long before its manufacturer does. This is not traditional market research — asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business.” –“To Charge Up, Put Customers In Charge,” Lego Mindstorms was built on innovations of passionately involved teachers The New York Times, June 18, 2006

MARKET TREND 3 Small companies have access to tools previously built only for the enterprise Enterprise-class software is being reinvented at the small business and consumer level using new tools and models pioneered for the consumer market. Small companies are now ready and willing to pay for online software that “just works.” Companies like Salesforce.com and 37 Signals have proved, with applications like their Web-based project management and CRM software, that there are signiﬁcant 37 Signals’ Basecamp provides a streamlined approach to project management that works proﬁts to be made delivering to this market. well for small businesses, and large ones too.

MARKET TREND 3 Small companies have access to tools previously available only for the enterprise “Savvy new companies are wedging themselves into established industries, unburdened by the ﬁxed costs of infrastructure past. They're doing it with the help of resources never before available so cheaply to startups, like outsourced manufacturing, Internet-powered publicity, and robust design tools. To get to market fast, they farm out everything they can, from logistics and billing to sales and support.” - “The New Instant Companies,” Business 2.0, June 1, 2005 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/06/01/8263450/ index.htm

COMPETITIVE SITUATION Current solutions are closed systems or under-specialized HIGH Satisfaction CRM CRM is a closed system Satisfaction frames customer focused on managing agents, service features through tracking issues, and integration with other Discussion Boards open conversations sometimes served by information systems. discussion boards LOW Quantitative Issue Search/ Out-of-box Customer Cost Analysis Tracking Discovery experience Evangelism Conﬁgurability Service Level Email Hackability Tools Conversation/ Qualitative Agreement Management Community Analysis (SLA)

COMPETITIVE SITUATION How Satisfaction changes the game Customers discover solutions and open conversations via 1 collectively optimized search, providing a personal touch 4 5 6 3 Satisfaction enables hackability rather than configurability, so fans and CRM developers can extend the system infinitely. 2 other 1 2 3 Companies get started and see benefits immediately, with no training. Satisfaction makes customer service easy and fun. Satisfaction engenders open and ongoing conversations that 4 engage customer interactions in a meaningful way Cultivate and identify customer evangelists, reward them, and 5 leverage them as experts and volunteer marketers Track the qualitative health of customer satisfaction, changing 6 primary metric from # closed issues to relative happiness Quantitative Issue Search/ Out-of-box Customer Cost Analysis Tracking Discovery experience Evangelism Configurability Service Level Email Hackability Tools Conversation/ Qualitative Agreement Management Community Analysis (SLA)

REVENUE MODEL Tiered Monthly Subscription Service Satisfaction is offered for a monthly subscription fee determined by features and customer volume. The scalable pricing supports our initial small business target, and expands to ﬁt larger companies. Negotiated pricing is available for companies with large customer bases. EXAMPLE SUBSCRIPTION PRICING Premium Plus Basic Free $99/month $59/month $29/month Number of 2000 500 200 50 Customers File Storage 2GB 500 MB 250 MB 25 MB Private messaging ! ! ! Custom designs ! ! ! Ad Free ! ! ! SSL secure messages !

Thank You invest@getsatisfaction.com

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by Thor on Feb 16, 2010

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