Redrawing the boundariesof customer service

The Power of Customer ConversationsTHE OPPORTUNITY

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.

Who we areSUMMARY

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.

Email embodies the current problemTHE PROBLEM

Most small businesses today rely on email (e.g. MSOutlook) to respond to their customer issues. Email makes it difficult to track resolution and exacerbates the repetitive drudgery of traditional customer service.

Information Overload!

Out of sight, out of mind

Always behind in responding

Replace the Contact page on every business siteOUR SOLUTION

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.

Companies and communities work together OUR SOLUTION

Customer questions and employee answers are publicly viewable and easily findable.

Customers themselves become a rich source of solutions, ideas and enthusiasm.

Satisfaction reflects customer feelings, as well as topics of concern.

Satisfaction: a new model for customer serviceOUR SOLUTION

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.

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.

What can Satisfaction do for small business?PRODUCT BENEFITS

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.

The success of Satisfaction rides on three accelerating

market trends

MARKET TRENDS

Customers are talking to one another onlineMARKET TREND 1

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.

“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.

Customers are talking to one another onlineMARKET TREND 1

Companies are seeing the financial benefits of engaging directly with customers

MARKET TREND 2

“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 2006http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_52/b4015401.htm

“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,” The New York Times, June 18, 2006

Companies are seeing the financial benefits of engaging directly with customers

MARKET TREND 2

Lego Mindstorms was built on innovationsof passionately involved teachers

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 profits to be made delivering to this market.

Small companies have access to tools previously built only for the enterprise

MARKET TREND 3

37 Signals’ Basecamp provides a streamlined approach to project management that workswell for small businesses, and large ones too.

Small companies have access to tools previously available only for the enterprise

MARKET TREND 3

“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, 2005http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/06/01/8263450/index.htm

HIGH

LOW

Cost

Configurability

QuantitativeAnalysis

Service LevelAgreement

(SLA)

Search/Discovery

Hackability

Satisfaction

Discussion Boards

CRM

Current solutions are closed systems or under-specialized

COMPETITIVE SITUATION

IssueTracking

EmailManagement

Out-of-boxexperience

Conversation/Community

CustomerEvangelism

ToolsQualitative

Analysis

CRM is a closed system focused on managing agents, tracking issues, and integration with other information systems.

Satisfaction frames customer service features through open conversations sometimes served by discussion boards

Cost

Configurability

QuantitativeAnalysis

Service LevelAgreement

(SLA)

Search/Discovery

Hackability

CRM

How Satisfaction changes the gameCOMPETITIVE SITUATION

IssueTracking

EmailManagement

Out-of-boxexperience

Conversation/Community

CustomerEvangelism

ToolsQualitative

Analysis

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Customers discover solutions and open conversations via collectively optimized search, providing a personal touch

Satisfaction enables hackability rather than configurability, so fans and other developers can extend the system infinitely.

Satisfaction engenders open and ongoing conversations that engage customer interactions in a meaningful way

Companies get started and see benefits immediately, with no training. Satisfaction makes customer service easy and fun.

Cultivate and identify customer evangelists, reward them, and leverage them as experts and volunteer marketers

Track the qualitative health of customer satisfaction, changing primary metric from # closed issues to relative happiness

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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.

Tiered Monthly Subscription ServiceREVENUE MODEL

Premium

$99/monthPlus

$59/monthBasic

$29/monthFree

Number of Customers

2000 500 200 50

File Storage 2GB 500 MB 250 MB 25 MB

Private messaging

Custom designs

Ad Free

SSL secure messages

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EXAMPLE SUBSCRIPTION PRICING

Thank Youinvest@getsatisfaction.com