INTERVIEW WITH THOR MULLER
Monday I discussed an interesting new company - Satisfaction - that uses crowdsourcing as the basis of a business model centered on improving customer support. Today, I am posting excerpts from an interview I recently did on IM with Thor Muller, co-founder and CEO of Satisfaction.
We had a side business called Valleyschwag that exploded from 0 to 2000 customers virtually overnight. We weren't prepared for the customer deluge particularly the customer service! We could easily spend hours every day responding to the email, but we noticed that customers began answering each other's questions in the blog comments but it was just a small minority of customers. Most people just sent email so we started thinking about how to put the community in front of the email because the community was often better and faster than we were using the brute force method. When we would communicate publicly rather than privately our messages were magnified in significance. Also, we'd repeat ourselves a lot less. Most email support is pure repetition so a mechanism for answering questions once was very appealing. And it was more than just answering questions; it was brainstorming on how to improve the product
So it struck us that this phenomenon of transparency + open conversation was a fundamental shift happening online. Well we had a trend and a pressing need, but it took some work to find the "center" of our business. We initially looked at the problem from the company's perspective out. But it wasn't until we inverted that model that we came up with a really exciting business model basically to view customer service from the customer's perspective, which makes the company a nice-to-have participant (not required) since most issues can be solved by knowledgeable fellow customers.
What we didn't expect is that the strongest interest would be from large consumer brands.
There is the increasing recognition that the center of gravity in company-customer relationships is moving outside the company into the hands of empowered customers. The enlightened companies see this as potentially very positive or I should say *individuals* within these companies see it that way.
So the trick here is to re-contextualize customer service as we like to say: Customer service is the new marketing. We don't go into meetings that are customer support personnel alone; they are almost always initiated by marketing or brand focused folks. This is very interesting, but logical when you consider that customer service is increasingly seen as a potential treasure trove of customer development; so using social media to *do* the customer service is well timed.
To strategic business folks we're a new way to go to their customers wherever they are and we're working on extending our system to the edges of the internet: open API, white label system, facebook apps.
Companies can set up a forum. Lots of free forum software. Unfortunately forums are crap; most of us hate forums; it's difficult to find answers, for instance. Satisfaction surfaces answers based on user input. So a user can go from question to answer-- even amidst a long conversation---and see the top answer(s) in a flash. So it's a dynamic FAQ in that regard. There are many small ways we've taken the discussion model and architected around the specific needs of customer service. But the bigger point is that we've created a framework that resembles a social network between customers and the products they use.
Step 1 was to provide a set of tools for customers and companies to communicate more effectively. Step 2 is to allow customers to "follow" all the products they use and companies and other customers, too. So this dissolves the barrier to engaging in this networked customer service across whole ecosystems of products because products don't live in isolation. They're usually interconnected with many other products/services provided by other companies. The classic "it's not my problem" problem when a company can't answer your question because it's actually about another's company's product. The reason big companies can't do this themselves is partially that "this" isn't about a single company. The whole point is to provide a non-company owned space for customers and companies to interact as a "Switzerland" for customer service.
It's tempting to distill this down to authority vs. authenticity but we believe that by recontextualizing the company/customer interaction in this more social way we can get everyone acting more human. We recognize that there are certain types of things people ask other users that they wouldn't necessarily ask an employee. We call this the "how does my ass look in these jeans" category.
Answers voted up by users are called "people's pick." Company reps have the option to mark their answer as an "official response" which also appears above the discussion. We've found that having employees there really provokes more interest and involvement from users; people like to be heard.
We don't use the term forum. Only forum users use forums. But if you look at the map of a company's support channels the forum is this silo that's marginalized "over there" where they put their crazies. Our notion of where customer service is going is that conversation is the fundamental organizing unit of the Internet and that becomes the foundation upon which other tools (dynamic FAQs, wikis, etc) can be built.
First, companies can no longer act like they're in control. The only way of gaining the advantages of authentic customer participation is to embrace that. There are specific behaviors that create goodwill and protect against the downside of transparency -- being more human, less corporate; being more communicative about the good *and* especially the bad: apologize! and fix mistakes! Let customers defend you. Make it easy for them do this, because they'll always do it better than you can.
As for other parts of the business. We're seeing crowdsourcing in marketing, of course. Letting users evangelize you in digital media in product development. Think Dell's Ideastorm or Threadless or 8020 Publishing.
Any generic community platform can enable the general interactions we talk about but the effectiveness of a platform is in how a philosophy is embodied in its architecture. We're focused on customer service and creating discrete tools for companies and customers in that context.
So you have web 1.0 companies like RightNow which are enterprise apps that do enable tremendous efficiency through dynamic FAQs that intercept customer support issues before they hit the team. Our system replicates these efficiencies (only we give them away for free) but we transform the interaction into engagement. On the other side, you have sites like Fixya, which are doing a great job aggregating content from repairman about how to fix consumer electronics and appliances but which aren't really about fostering vibrant ongoing interactions between customers and the products they use.
Here is how companies can integrate Satisfaction into their business.
1. They can participate loosely by "claiming" their company on Satisfaction, and monitoring conversations as they happen. We encourage them to import their FAQs as a way of setting a baseline of initial answers.
2. They can embed our widgets. Timbuk2 for instance has a live search widget, which can intercept issues before they hit the email.
3. We're soon to release a white-label service, which provides an instant-on help section based on our core app. Within this service, there is an FAQ tool, contact page (with issue intercept), etc. It's push button simple to setup and is skinnable so it blends into the look and feel of a site.
4. An open API allowing for new kinds of apps to be built on top of Satisfaction, including embedding in desktop software, integrations with CRM/trouble ticket systems, etc.
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Satisfaction is certainly challenging traditional customer service assumptions and redefining our notions of crowdsourcing. It will be interesting to see how the model evolves and how comfortable companies will be in embracing this approach.
More broadly, this interview reflects my continuing interest in how social networks are shaping customer support and ultimately corporate communications. It is a topic I plan to regularly visit.
Let me get back to you.
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