The company also has a new leader. In late February, board member Michelle Peluso took over as CEO, replacing the company’s chairman, Kevin Ryan. Peluso most recently was the consumer chief marketing officer and Internet officer at Citigroup, and previously spent six years as CEO of Travelocity.

I sat down with her last week at Gilt’s New York City headquarters to discuss what she has been up to during her first 100 days. Short answer: A ton. Here’s an edited look at Peluso’s thoughts on some key topics, including new business ideas, acquisition targets and positioning Gilt for a possible IPO:

On doing everyone’s job

One of things I’ve been doing is getting to know the team on a more granular level. Being on the board, I knew the senior level mostly. I’ve spent two weeks in each department. I do meet-and-greets, meet with high-potential and top performers, and then do some of their work. In Kentucky, I picked, received and packed. I’ve shot photos, styled, cropped photos, re-cropped. I’ve done [quality assurance] … and pushed code to production. It’s been important getting to really know the team and key leaders two levels down that I didn’t know as much. And really knowing how they work at a very granular level.

On new ways Gilt may work with fashion brands

One of the things brands have asked is whether we could be more of a marketing platform for them around opening new stores, juicing new lines, thinking about new demographics. How do we do a better job beyond just selling excess?

With Banana Republic, we introduced their “Mad Men” collection first on Gilt. It wasn’t a flash sale, but it was exciting and nuanced. Or if Jonathan Adler is opening stores and wants to drive foot traffic and pays us a marketing commission off of everything those people buy. Or it could be advertising dollars. We are looking at advertising revenue a little more.

And as we become bigger, are there more parts of the value chain we can play in if there are brands who come to us and say, “We don’t know what to do with mobile,” or “We don’t really know how to distinguish ourselves in the e-commerce world”? Does it make sense for us to help?

On whether this means that Gilt could start a consulting business

Yes … or not. Maybe we are actually running the mobile apps for them or doing distribution. Maybe they send products to our warehouse, and we manage distribution and fulfillment of those products.

On all of these ideas, we looked at some models and started to launch some things to see what gets traction.

On focus

We got too unfocused and launched a few too many categories, and launched a few businesses that may have been exciting businesses and maybe under different circumstances could have built scale … but we got distracted from the core business.

On asking staff to come up with other new business ideas

We set teams in motion to come up with 30 ideas, with timelines and parameters, and they came back and pitched the exec team over a couple of days. We cut a bunch out and put a few through.

We’ve taken the net of the ideas and are now through the second round of evaluation of those ideas. The goal is to finish that by the end of June, because July first is our new fiscal year.

What some of the ideas might be

• International: We have done a very, very light touch on international; we allow shipping to other countries, but we haven’t really done local language translation or actually making shipping affordable by looking hard at vendors. We haven’t accepted returns. Everyone gets the same merchandise at 12 noon. There’s a lot to improve. International has grown without doing any of that from four percent to 8.5-to-nine percent without really trying.
• The sale of pre-owned/vintage clothes: We do some vintage sales that are highly successful — they’re incredibly pristine … On that strategy, one step is to diversify sources through third parties, another step could be truly getting into marketplaces like Threadflip and The RealReal. We could even acquire as one of our options.
• Mobile: We just crossed over 40 percent of revenue coming from mobile. We are a much more mobile company than the vast majority of commerce and e-tailer players. But can we think of some next-gen ideas? We just launched the ability to take a picture of your face and swirl through different glasses on your face. We’ve looked at a bunch of those ideas.

On boring ideas where there is opportunity

Then we’ll look at some things that are frankly really mundane, but also important. Things like chat and other ways to improve customer service — changing return policy. These are things we’re looking at, but we are pretty close actually to final decisions.

Whether she thinks further layoffs are needed

No. I think our goal is to grow revenue significantly faster than we grow our cost basis. Where we free up resources by doing some things less manually, we’ll put more resources on other things. I’d love to put more people on mobile development, I’d love to go after vintage a little more aggressively, and we think international is a big opportunity.

Morale

I asked for a full employee survey before I joined. We usually do it in May, but I asked for it to be done the week before I started. The questions around being proud to work here, being proud of the brand, and loving the people you work with — those scores are high 80s and 90s … which is really, really, really good.

And then some stuff where there’s real opportunity for improvement — we’ve grown so fast that we haven’t always done a good job of helping with career paths.

Financial goals

• Being adjusted EBIDTA-positive this year
• Starting to generate cash consistently from operations by the end of the calendar year
• Growing revenue by robust double digits

IPO

Are we a good target for an IPO? Yes. And if you asked me why I think that, I’d say a lot of banks come in here, so we have a good sense of the market. And we are the biggest, most powerful brand in the space. We have recently been seeing strong double-digit growth, we’ve been proving we can be adjusted EBIDTA-positive, which we have been for a couple of quarters [Gilt about broke even on an adjusted EBIDTA basis in Q1], we’ve got a bunch of upside in international. I think we have a compelling story for a public company profile. … We’ve been having some conversations.

Having said that, we’re not in a rush. … Going public has its consequences. We’ve seen in the last six to 12 months that it’s not so fun to be in a rush to go public.

I believe we’re a strong public-company target, and it’s our likely path, but we’re not in rush. It’s a very dynamic conversation. Part of it is what I think, part of it is what changes if a competitor goes public, for example.

On whether Gilt has room to grow, or whether it has reached most of its potential customer base

People ask that question about flash sales in general. When you step back and look at the total luxury market sold at discount, it’s still such a tiny fraction. We have done some things that give us a good idea that the market size is still really large, with room for growth. We’ve done a little bit of TV — direct-response TV — and have seen customer growth accelerate a bit. We’re really convinced that we have a relatively untapped market in front of us.

Then, with our new ideas on top of those, we think there’s some nice upside. So, for a variety of reasons, I feel good about the revenue growth opportunity in front of Gilt.

I think the story of a bubble around flash sales — we’ve been a little quiet around that, and maybe fed it by saying we’re not going to be in Jetsetter and not going to do [Gilt] Taste. I think the actual performance of the business is pretty compelling.

On whether Gilt City warehouse sales could lead to Gilt retail locations

They’ve been great, and done in a very brand-accretive way — very much in line with flash sales — a little bit of frenzy, fun, a little bit crazy. And we get to move some of our inventory at the end of the day.

But I don’t think brick-and-mortar is a big idea for us.

On the knock that Gilt holds too much inventory

It’s important to us have a reasonable amount of flexibility for our partners. I won’t give you percentages, but there are different kinds of ways we work with partners. Some of it we’re selling a first-look, others we’re getting a look at excess and don’t take inventory. For others, we buy the inventory we want, or we may do a take-all, and sell what we can and put the rest in final sale. For other partners, it’s effectively drop-ship.

On revenue

That’s one of the things I don’t want to be talking about. We have talked about that in the 2012 calendar year we had gross revenue of $600 million, but that included Jetsetter, which just got sold. We’re not giving the number for calendar year 2013, but if you stripped Jetsetter out of both, we’d have robust double-digit growth.

Image copyright Cartoonresource

During my travels, I have spoken with a number of East Coast business leaders who were evaluating online services to integrate into their companies. Listening to their complaints around previous products they had used, I quickly realized that Silicon Valley has become completely out of touch with its customers — and yes, that includes enterprise customers. Surprising, but true. Although we are iterating and building faster than ever, we have seemingly forgotten about the last “S” in SaaS — the “Service” in Software as a Service.

Tech companies in the Valley have become chiefly concerned with wringing out costs and, importantly, impressing their investors by demonstrating business momentum and growth of user numbers. In doing so, many companies have opted to run their customers through a low-touch, self-service experience. Certain human aspects of relationship are quickly being abandoned, just as it is with the use of texting and Snapchat to stay connected. Communication these days requires very little face-to-face time. However, this depersonalization does not work for companies and the enterprise, though many SaaS companies are reducing contact and service when they should be increasing it. The Valley has forgotten that a great user experience extends beyond the product, and delighting customers with a total user experience is at the heart of long-term sustainable business.

So how did we get here, and what’s the alternative? Let’s break it down:

How Software Ate Service

As we took our first baby steps toward going paperless, we learned quickly that we could build and use all kinds of services on the Web, from online banking and stock trading, to purchasing airline tickets and hotel rooms. Meanwhile, a new ability to contribute content and engage with other Web users led us to become social. It changed the landscape of the Web, and companies were quick to jump on the social bandwagon. The downside of these simultaneous shifts is that it caused people to become less connected and less intimate, as software companies realized that they could deliver software from behind their computer screens via the Web.

Companies started to focus their attention on cutting operating expenses with the goal of maximizing margins. A whole new era of Web tools for customer interaction came alive. Service platforms like Zendesk started popping up, and companies placed big investments in automating the customer experience. In fact, “automation” from marketing to sales to support is a higher order bit for every SaaS company. But these investments have inserted a larger barrier between themselves and their customers. Upset customers are now met with automated emails and tweets from a service platform that are supposed to calm them down and boost regard for the company. I can’t say that a vague email with my name filled into a blank space ever made me feel like a special and valued customer.

For some reason, this form of computer-generated communication was okay with Silicon Valley. Perhaps it was because it became the norm and tech companies felt they needed to stay as lean as possible while adapting to changing times. Or we were oblivious to the larger impact it would have on relationships outside our tech centered lives here in Silicon Valley.

How SaaS Is Seen Outside the Bubble

Outside of the Valley bubble, a very different market exists, with frustrated customers who hate what SaaS has done to their providers. Instead of taking pride in their company and showing appreciation for each customer, service agents are installed as a churn defense strategy. In fact, every SaaS company employs this kind of strategy so as to minimize the cancerous effects of customer turnover. Automating customer service is reactionary and the churn defense strategy is causing companies to invest in more avatars, more help desk platforms that integrate with social media and more internal customer success managers. But customers feel abandoned, and they’ve given it a name — “cloud-i-fied” — a term that they use outside of Silicon Valley to describe what happens when a provider’s lackadaisical approach to service says to them, “Hey customer: Deal with my service avatar and please don’t churn, because my investors hate churn and it kills my SaaS model.”

It has come to the point where live customer visits is the surprise and delight feature that makes other SaaS companies stand out. A great example of this is a line from a Discover Card commercial from earlier this year that reads, “Some companies just don’t appreciate the power of real conversation.” Real human interaction seems to be the new sacrilege in SaaS.

Where to Go From Here? SaaS 2.0…

I believe we need to learn from the past and bring life back to SaaS by using technology to help us drive down costs and create more fluid transactions, while at the same time using it to reengage with a higher level of service for our customers. Treat them right. Make them feel special again. Win them over.

Companies that create a concierge-like experience are standouts in the customer experience realm. Great examples of these are Uber, Lyft, and Virgin America. When you need a ride, an Uber or a Lyft driver is just a click away on your smartphone to take you where you want to go. Uber makes you feel important when they arrive at your door in a sleek black car, whereas Lyft makes you feel like you’re riding with a friend as the company prides itself on its fun and outgoing drivers. Both services allow you to rate your driver after the ride, an important feature that displays real-time company accountability and value of customer experience. A few feel that services like Uber are too expensive, but people are willing to pay that little bit extra to feel like they are being taken care of. Would you rather ride in a yellow cab that has a $50 vomit clean-up fee (as I saw in a NYC cab) or spend an extra $2 (if that) and take Lyft?

This is a wakeup call for SaaS companies that want to do business beyond Silicon Valley. They shouldn’t underestimate the value of actually going to see the customer and shaking their hand, walking in their shoes, meeting their employees or buying them lunch. The market is fatigued with poor service and the companies that can communicate and build relationships effectively will be the ones that maintain stronger customer retention and ultimately raise their bottom line.

There’s a hole in SaaS that we need to address. Help us out, and don’t be a SaaS-hole.

Jeff Cavins is the CEO of visual collaboration company FuzeBox. Follow him on Twitter @jeffreycavins.

The first Google product to get powered by StellaService’s data will be the Google Trusted Store badge program, the companies announced today. As its name indicates, the Google Trusted Store program aims to signal to online shoppers which online merchants are the most trustworthy.

Up to now, the program’s ratings have used a few signals, including the percentage of a given retailer’s orders that ship on time and survey results from customers who have opted in to sharing information about their shopping experience. Now, that ratings methodology will also be supplemented by StellaService’s data which, frankly, seems more comprehensive.

StellaService has dozens of employees who test out the customer service practices of online retailers big and small on a daily basis. These employees/shoppers perform tasks such as buying products, returning them, emailing and calling with questions in an effort to put together a comprehensive rating of customer service departments.

“We’re out there stress-testing the marketplace to find out what it’s really like to be a customer,” said StellaService CEO Jordy Leiser. “For example, it’s amazing how many companies just don’t answer email.”

The little digital Google Trusted Store badge might not matter for shoppers who only shop at big online retailers such as Amazon and Walmart.com. But for those shoppers who will buy from a lesser known site if it means saving $20, the Trusted Store icon could make a difference in deciding it might be worth it to cough up a bit more dough for a less stressful buying experience.

Google pays StellaService to license the data, Leiser said. The two companies will be looking for other ways to integrate the StellaService data into the Google shopping experience, but a Google spokesperson said the company did not have any other product integration announcements to make at this time.

StellaService has raised more than $22 million from investors, including Norwest Venture Partners, DFJ Gotham Ventures and RRE Ventures.

This one doesn’t sound at first quite as interesting, but from the point of view of complex computing tasks, it’s pretty cool. When you think about all the ways that companies have to try to engage with and then make their customers happy and the ways they can do that more effectively, you can probably imagine how a deeply analytical computer might be useful.

IBM calls it the Watson Engagement Advisor; it’s an offshoot its Smarter Commerce initiative. Consider that Watson is smart enough to understand the natural ebb and flow of human language and is designed to answer questions in much the same way humans do, and then quickly sort through a set of known information to determine the best answer, and you’ll realize it’s a fit for customer service.

In that way, Watson can learn over time, and like a good bartender with a lot of regulars, keep track of the unique likes and dislikes of customers and get better at it over time. And that’s important as consumers come to expect to be able to interact with companies pretty much wherever they are and on whatever device they happen to be using at the time: Whether it’s a smart phone, tablet, PC or whatever, they will expect — already are expecting — consistent experiences. Consumers, especially the younger ones, will expect companies to shift with the marketplace as tastes change and evolve.

Watson can be the voice that customers hear when they reach out to the company asking questions. Watson has only gotten smarter since its run on “Jeopardy,” speeding up its performance by 240 percent while slimming down the size of the system required to run it by 75 percent. Already the Nielsen Company and the Royal Bank of Canada are among those kicking the tires in trials.

For the third consecutive day, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, has run articles criticizing Apple for its warranty policy in China and calling Apple’s defense of its customer-service practices arrogant. Apple has declined to comment on the coverage.

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The People’s Daily newspaper, the party’s traditional mouthpiece, in a front-page article on Monday accused the electronics maker of declining journalists’ requests for interviews and issuing an “empty and self-praising” response to a recent critical report by China’s national television broadcaster. The article was accompanied by a cartoon with a figure representing the company, saying, “Apple statement: empty.”

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Apps may be creating new jobs for developers and marketers. But around the edges of the rest of the economy, they’re also starting to become a substitute for people who earn a paycheck.

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As Benioff keynotes go, this one has been described to me as “understated.” Rather than occupy a huge venue like the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Salesforce is holding this event at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Rather than a three-hour revival meeting, it will be a simpler one-hour address. It’s as though a big-name rock singer known for big stadium concert blowouts has shifted to the coffeehouse circuit.

Expect to hear the words “service” and “mobile” a lot. Salesforce made an announcement overnight about what it calls its Service Cloud. It has been adapted to run natively on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. The idea is that customer service reps or any other customer-facing employee can use a mobile device to help customers get the help they need or buy the stuff they want, regardless of how and when they present themselves.

One feature due later this year is called co-browsing. It allows customer-facing reps to engage in what Salesforce describes as a “shared Web experience,” basically browsing together. That pair of shoes you want but can’t seem to find, or that pair of slacks in your size? Sales or service reps can help you find it, and can see what you see on whatever screen you happen to be using.

A big theme of Salesforce’s assumptions and positioning will be around customer expectations. All of us are so used to having access to everything within seconds; when we’re customers we get impatient when we have to wait for someone else to track down whatever it is we need.

A couple of other new additions to the Service Cloud are aimed at addressing that. Mobile Service Cloud Communities give companies a way to build a single place where customers can get answers, either by way of self-help, other people or via company experts.

Another is an instant chat capability. The example I was given here is a clothing store. Say you’re waiting for an alteration. You check with the store, and the sales rep who takes your call is able to contact the tailor working on it directly, who tells you it will be ready in a few hours and you can pick it up on your way home from work.

What you won’t hear Benioff talking about is how the social enterprise is going to change the world. That message is so 2012, and has more or less played itself out.

But you can’t argue with the performance of Salesforce shares. They’re up by more than 34 percent since hitting a recent low in August. They closed Monday at $163.51. And the company looks on track to deliver its planned four-for-one share split. That, at least, is a message most shareholders can get behind.

No passwords were involved in the attack, said the companies, who are alerting their users tonight.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane disclosed the security breach in a blog post on Thursday. Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest then alerted affected users via email.

The identities of the affected companies were published by Wired, and they each have independently confirmed to AllThingsD via email, though Zendesk declined to identify them directly.

In addition to users’ email addresses, associated subject lines of the three social media companies’ support emails were compromised. Tumblr warned users that because subject lines could include their blog addresses, hackers may be able to associate their emails with their blogs.

A Zendesk spokeswoman said to expect more detail soon, while a Pinterest spokesman noted, “There is an ongoing investigation by authorities.”

San Francisco-based Zendesk is used by some 25,000 companies. Other customers include Sony Music, Disney, Vodafone, Groupon and Kickstarter.

Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com

Even customer service has started a shift to the cloud, and a company that specializes in precisely that is Parature. I first encountered Parature in 2011. The basic idea with its cloud-based software is to reduce the cost and time commitment required to answer the same support questions over and over. Simple as that.

Well, building on a partnership first established two years ago, Parature is about to announce that it is teaming up with Microsoft, the maker of Dynamics CRM software.

The new integration will give Dynamics users a platform from which to engage with customers on the Web, via live chat session, on their mobile devices or through social networks.

Key features include a self-service part that creates a knowledge base customers can use to get quick answers to regular questions on their own. Repeated questions tend to eat up a lot of time and attention that could be better spent elsewhere.

There’s also a chat service, so your service agents can be right there in real time. And there’s a social component as well, including Parature for Facebook and support for Twitter. Yes, customer support happens there, too.

The point of the integration is to get customer data that lives in the CRM application all in the same place as records of support calls and help requests. Logical, right?

Anyway, Parature has come a long way since I last looked in on it. It has been used to support approximately 55 million end users worldwide, and its customers include IBM and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It’s backed by about $30 million in VC investments from Accel Partners, Valhalla Partners and Sierra Ventures.

Image: Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com

Think of it like TaskRabbit, Redbeacon, Pearl.com or LawPivot — but instead of getting help around the house or medical or legal advice, Directly helps people with their problems related to AT&T, Bank of America, DirecTV or one of the other 24 companies it independently supports.

For those companies’ customers, Directly wants to be an alternative to tweeting out into the ether, struggling through often-unhelpful overseas call centers, or scanning the dead ends of online forum discussions to find the occasional relevant comment.

Directly co-founder Antony Brydon claimed in an interview last week that companies don’t mind that Directly is stepping in between them and their customers. He said that, in testing — Directly has been operating for the past year under the name Insidr.com — companies often informally asked staffers to participate with their own expert knowledge.

Unlike some Q&A sites like Quora that shun actual cash payments, Directly supports both karmically driven and monetarily driven helpers.

Directly’s questioners can opt to assign a reward — say $10 — for an answer. Answerers can cash out the money or donate it. The two can connect to each other for a one-on-one consultation.

Also, contrary to the trend of using social authentication from Facebook to make a marketplace more transparent, Directly allows for pseudonyms, with answerers ranked on their “helpfulness.”

After customer service, Directly wants to target mortgage advice. The company — which currently has six employees and is based in San Francisco — sees itself as a platform for matching up customers and experts in all sorts of fields, Brydon said.

Brydon and his co-founders have a history of starting and selling companies together, including Visible Path and IUMA. They’ve raised $1.75 million in seed funding from True Ventures and other investors.

In an interview with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show this morning, Jeff Bezos said, “It will be a record season for us, knock on wood.”

Amazon is hiring 50,000 seasonal workers to help pick up the pace in its dozens of warehouses worldwide, which will be humming at full capacity with employees packing and shipping oodles of boxes to homes in time for Christmas.

This year, physical retailers have lined up a fairly broad defensive strategy against the online behemoth. Many retailers are promising to match online prices, or even taking it a step further by offering same-day shipping in some markets (which is a day faster than Amazon can usually offer).

Still, Bezos was upbeat about the company’s holiday prospects, and likely for good reason. Last year, Amazon’s revenue grew 35 percent in Q4 compared to the same period in 2010 — double the rate of the overall e-commerce market. “We’ve always been in a hyper-competitive industry. That’s a good thing. It’s good for customers, and it’s good for the companies who are forced to innovate,” he told Lauer. “We have to evolve, and we are providing better customer service today than we ever have.”

Bezos appeared on “Today” freshly named as Fortune’s 2012 Businessperson of the Year for his role as the “ultimate disrupter.” Here’s the interview, which is worth watching to hear Lauer botching the name of Amazon’s best-selling Kindle Paperwhite (a.k.a. the Paperweight):

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The round includes a venture portion led by Redpoint Ventures, and $15 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane

Alongside the funding, Zendesk is launching a complete rewrite of its service, as well as a new app platform.

Given its familiarity with customer service pitfalls, Zendesk is trying to avoid alienating users who don’t like the change. The company promises to keep its old version running indefinitely and give users the option to switch back and forth, said CEO Mikkel Svane in an interview Tuesday.

Some 20,000 companies use Zendesk for customer service, and the company plans to apply at least part of its new funding to expanding around the world.

Svane mentioned that it took him less than a week to land those tens of millions in funding. Other investors included Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Why were investors so raring to go? Svane said they had heard about Zendesk increasing its monthly recurring revenue by 500 percent since its last funding round, in November 2010.

Also, this notion of “enterprise 2.0″ is pretty hot right now. Where people used to love talking about “the consumerization of enterprise” because consumer was sexy, now the emphasis seems to be more on the enterprise part.

I asked Svane whether he thought investors were flocking to enterprise because they liked the sound of paying customers, after all the problems ad-supported consumer tech businesses have been having as they try to enter the public markets.

Svane laughed it off and said that was just a storyline reporters like to tell. (I told him I’d bet that if he were Aaron Levie from Box, he would have said “Absolutely,” and run with it — and probably gotten some IPO innuendo in there, while he was at it.)

But no, Svane is a straight shooter, and an incredibly amiable one. See more in our video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120912/enterprise-is-so-hot-right-now-zendesk-raises-60m-for-customer-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120822/paypals-deal-with-discover-gives-it-scale-but-will-consumers-come/ http://allthingsd.com/20120822/paypals-deal-with-discover-gives-it-scale-but-will-consumers-come/#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:06:32 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=244013 PayPal announced a deal with Discover this morning that gives the online company an enormous opportunity to get a foothold in the offline world.

However, that’s just one side of the equation. To be successful, it will also need to get consumers excited about using its in-store payment offerings.

“If you build it …” goes the “Field of Dreams” philosophy. But will they come?

“That’s ultimately the question that they need to solve,” said Rick Oglesby, an analyst with Aite Group. “PayPal has achieved merchant coverage, as far as Discover goes, but on the consumer side, they have 50 million active users and very few of them have the ability to transact in the store.”

Initially, consumers will have to sign-up for a Discover-backed and PayPal-branded credit card, which does little to slim down the number of items consumers are carrying around in their wallets. Later, consumers will also have the option of paying by entering their mobile phone number and PIN at the terminal.

Clearly, having a registration requirement of any kind will slow adoption, especially since the easiest option will be to continue using cards or cash.

But there’s also the question of whether consumers trust PayPal enough to be the brand they use to make everyday purchases, from gas to groceries to clothing. The company has been around long enough to gain significant brand recognition, but in that time, the online payments pioneer has also accumulated a bit of baggage.

Almost anytime I write about PayPal, commenters voice their dislike for the eBay-owned company. From today’s post, one person complained: “PayPal is one of the worst companies to deal with. I’d rather pay with pretty much any method than PayPal.” Another said, “I like Discover, but hate PayPal with the fire of a thousand suns. To be honest, this agreement sours me on Discover a bit, just because PayPal is so anti-consumer.”

The brand also continues to be tarnished by a constant stream of negative media reports — even if they appear to be coming from a vocal minority.

A New York Times story earlier this month highlighted several horror stories from recent years that made consumers and businesses think twice about using PayPal. And sites like PayPalSucks.com, and its accompanying Facebook page, provide forums where consumers can rant. (The PayPal Sucks Facebook page has 83,500 “likes” compared to PayPal’s own Facebook page, which has 324,000.)

There is no doubt that PayPal is fully aware of this problem and is actively working on solutions.

In a recent blog post, Katherine Hutchison, the head of risk management for the Americas at PayPal, recently addressed one of the chief complaints from businesses regarding the freezing of funds in their accounts.

“We understand that it’s frustrating as a seller or small business to have delayed access to your money and feel like you don’t understand why,” she wrote. “We work to communicate this effectively through various channels (emails, customer support, web site and policy terms) but we understand that sometimes you’re looking for more from us.”

But at least PayPal is there to answer the phone when a problem does occur, which is more than some tech companies can claim. Based on the most recent information available, PayPal said it has 17 operation centers worldwide, staffed by 6,000 employees who speak 15 languages and answered an average of 64,255 calls and 16,670 emails a day in 2010.

To be sure, there was at least one entity that thought the deal had potential: Wall Street.

Today, both Discover and eBay hit new 52-week highs. At the close, eBay was at $47.00 and it continued to climb after hours. Discover closed at $38.43, then slipped back a bit after hours.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120822/paypals-deal-with-discover-gives-it-scale-but-will-consumers-come/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120807/sprint-ceo-hesse-good-customer-service-costs-less/ http://allthingsd.com/20120807/sprint-ceo-hesse-good-customer-service-costs-less/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:16:44 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=238678 Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said Tuesday that, like a good Olympic athlete, his company is always going to be focused on setting a new personal best.

There are still plenty of areas where Sprint trails its competitors, he said. But things are getting better every quarter.

“What you are not going to see around here are any ‘mission accomplished’ signs,” Hesse told a group of journalists — including AllThingsD — who have been touring the company’s Kansas headquarters over the past two days. “We are on a long-term turnaround plan.”

One of the big areas of improvement has been in customer service. A couple years ago, the company was ranked one of the worst in the industry and, at the same time, Sprint was spending twice as much as it does today, because it was dealing with more support calls and issuing bill credits to dissatisfied customers.

“Great customer service costs less,” Hesse said. “When we were last in the industry, we were spending twice as much.”

By cutting down on the reasons for customers to call in, Sprint has been able to close 29 call centers and yet still answer calls faster, Hesse said. Last quarter, the company had its fewest-ever calls from customers, and issued the smallest amount in bill credits.

Sprint is also finally gaining more customers from rivals than it is seeing defect to other carriers. After the company’s history of more net defections, more customers are now bringing their phone line to Sprint than are porting their number out — a metric that has now been positive for eight straight quarters.

That has been particularly important now that nearly everyone has a cellphone, meaning the battle is increasingly about winning over existing customers.

“It will be very important to do very well in the switching market,” Hesse said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120807/sprint-ceo-hesse-good-customer-service-costs-less/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/woof-rover-com-fetches-3-4-million-to-be-airbnb-for-dogs/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/woof-rover-com-fetches-3-4-million-to-be-airbnb-for-dogs/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:00:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=194106 Rover.com has raised $3.4 million to be the Airbnb of the dog-boarding market.

Rover is an alternative to dog kennels, much like how Airbnb offers an alternative to staying in hotels.

In addition to announcing the funding today, the Seattle company is also rolling out nationwide, after supporting only a handful of test markets.

Airbnb raised a blockbuster $112 million second round of funding last July from well-known Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz. In comparison, Rover has raised a much more modest round, and has nine employees. Investors in the round include Madrona Venture Group of Seattle, which led the round, CrunchFund, and other angels.

On the business side, there’s a big scale difference between the dog- and vacation-rental businesses. Despite the differences in scale, however, Rover’s CEO Aaron Easterly said the market opportunity is massive.

Easterly, who most recently worked at Microsoft in its advertising business, estimates the formal commercial dog-boarding market is worth up to $6.5 billion annually, and said that there’s a much larger informal market of people who rely on friends and family to take care of their pooches. He says that together the two are worth closer to $35 billion to $60 billion. That’s a lot of biscuits and squeaky toys.

The decision about where to leave your dog when you’re away from home is an emotional one, Easterly noted.

People want to make sure that their dogs are happy, and not just locked up in a kennel. On Rover, people can review homeowners’ profiles, so they can get a sense of how the owners would treat their dogs. Additionally, Easterly said, it’s common for the two sides to meet before a stay is booked.

Last week, I visited the company in their downtown Seattle offices with my dog, Fletch, to see just how much Rover drinks from the dog bowl.

Sure enough, my hyperactive mutt was allowed full access to the office, finding a variety of toys, from tennis balls to stuffed animals. The other four-legged residents welcomed him into their domain, although Easterly’s four-pound Pomeranian Caramel (a.k.a. Chief Rover), was wise to stay out of the way. A developer even offered to take a break to give Fletch a walk around the block.

Since launching in Seattle in November 2011, Rover.com has grown to over 10,000 active members in hundreds of cities across the country. It charges between 5 percent and 15 percent for the service, depending on a homeowner’s track record, including reviews and response times.

It has already dealt with some issues that Airbnb struggled with early on, like offering round-the-clock support and guarantees. Today, Rover is rolling out a Barkline (providing 24-hour customer service) nationwide to handle any emergencies. Rover also offers a satisfaction guarantee that covers the dog, its owner and the host, in case any problems arise.

But there are other requests that come up that are more cookie-cutter in nature.

In the video below, Easterly explains how one of the most important topics to dog owners is where their dog will sleep. Out of the 11 dogs he’s hosted, he said the biggest request was for the guest dog to stay in his bed — and sometimes under the covers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/woof-rover-com-fetches-3-4-million-to-be-airbnb-for-dogs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120404/another-science-start-up-wittlebee-gets-2-5-million-in-funding-for-kids-clothes-club/ http://allthingsd.com/20120404/another-science-start-up-wittlebee-gets-2-5-million-in-funding-for-kids-clothes-club/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:00:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=193027

Wittlebee, a monthly kids’ clothing club that was incubated at Los Angeles area “technology studio” Science, has gotten $2.5 million in funding.

Much like another Science start-up, Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee ships a custom box of high-quality kids’ clothes to members.

The seed round of funding was led by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, Crosslink, and Morado.

Wittlebee’s CEO and founder Sean Percival said the money would be used to create a private-label clothing line.

Wittlebee uses stay-at-home parents, who have used the site, as customer service reps. The start-up sends a new order of children’s apparel each month, including onesies, t-shirts, leggings, socks and pants, upping the sizes as the kid grows.

In other words, kind of like a never-ending online Gap.

Here’s the official press release on Wittlebee’s funding:

Wittlebee Raises $2.5 Million Seed Funding Lead By Rincon

Children’s clothing membership service to begin manufacturing private label designs to keep up with growing customer demand

Los Angeles, CA. April 4, 2012 — Wittlebee (www.Wittlebee.com), the affordable children’s clothing monthly membership service backed by technology studio Science Inc., today announces the company raised $2.5 million in seed funding leady by Rincon, with participation from SoftTech, Google Ventures, Matt Coffin, CrossLink, and Morado. Jim Andelman, co-founder and General Partner at Rincon, joins Wittlebee’s board alongside Michael Jones, founder and CEO of Science, and Sean Percival, Wittlebee’s founder and CEO.

Since launching less than two months ago, Wittlebee has experienced accelerated growth, in part because of Science’s track record of quickly scaling ecommerce businesses. The company will use the new investment to build out its executive team and user acquisitions.

Upon joining Wittlebee, customers are connected to a team of mom stylists who work with families to compose boxes of high-quality children’s clothing to meet individual children’s needs. Active kids in warm climates like Miami may receive appropriate t-shirts, shorts and socks whereas infants in Albany receive long-sleeve onesies and cozy pajamas.

“Wittlebee’s recent growth has been tremendous,” said Percival. “Our customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive; we are speaking to an audience of 20,000 highly engaged moms across social media who tell us they’re delighted we’re saving them time and money for all their children’s clothing needs. We plan to use Rincon’s investment to create Wittlebee’s private label clothing line that will truly showcase our commitment to high-quality practical children’s apparel.”

In the coming months, customers will receive a selection of parents’ favorite well-known brands in addition to Wittlebee’s private label. Manufactured both locally in Los Angeles and abroad, the new line represents customers’ wish-list of kids’ must-haves, from high-quality soft fabrics, to a wide color palate, to unique graphic designs. After months of research and testing apparel options through Wittlebee’s social networks, the resulting Wittlebee bespoke label will be a timeless array of apparel basics to carry kids through seasons, activities and all their lifestyle needs.

“For every investment decision we make, we care most about customer value proposition, team, and business model,” said Jim Andelman, Managing Partner at Rincon. “We’ve been tremendously impressed by parents’ positive response to Wittlebee’s offering: they love the selections, they save money and you can’t beat the convenience of clothes showing up right to your door. The e-commerce space is exploding in LA, and we’re very excited to be at the forefront with Wittlebee.”

For more on Wittlebee, please visit www.Wittlebee.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120404/another-science-start-up-wittlebee-gets-2-5-million-in-funding-for-kids-clothes-club/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120105/kindle-owners-upset-after-receiving-cryptic-subscription-offer-from-amazon/ http://allthingsd.com/20120105/kindle-owners-upset-after-receiving-cryptic-subscription-offer-from-amazon/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:02:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=160771 Amazon has issued an apology tonight after upsetting Kindle owners, who learned this morning that they were selected to receive a publication they didn’t sign up for — and could be charged for in the future.

The problems kicked off this morning when Amazon started sending emails to select Kindle owners, alerting them to a free trial of “The Kindle Compass.”

In the email, Amazon failed to explain what “The Kindle Compass” was, and worse, implied that customers would be charged for it going forward.

An Amazon spokesperson said a second letter has been sent this evening, explaining that “The Kindle Compass” is a pilot project, and apologizing for any confusion over the price. “We built it to always be free for customers, and you will never be charged for it,” the company told its customers.

Still, the response comes hours after much of the damage had already been done.

Angry customers flooded Kindle forums, posting more than 100 complaints to topics called “Where is Kindle Compass Magazine?” and “Auto-Subscription to the Kindle Compass??”

The confusion was understandable.

In the original message, Amazon misled consumers about the terms: “If you enjoy your free trial, do nothing and your subscription will automatically continue at the monthly subscription rate.”

However, no rate was ever mentioned.

Even worse, those who contacted Amazon customer service said the reps weren’t familiar with the publication, so the best they could do was help them to unsubscribe to ensure they would not be charged. At this point, people are still confused as to what “The Kindle Compass” is all about.

A spokesperson did not return emails asking for more clarity on what the publication is, and it’s unclear how many customers were affected (not all Kindle owners received the email).

In the forums, the complaints centered on two concerns: That Amazon would sign them up for something they did not knowingly subscribe to, and that they may be charged for it.

One consumer, who used the name “Susabelle”, wrote: “I am absolutely APPALLED. Amazon, you should be completely ashamed of yourself!! An auto-subscription to a publication I’ve NEVER heard of, that you will be auto-billing me for after 14 days? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND??”

Here is the apology Amazon sent to consumers this evening:

This morning we sent you an email regarding The Kindle Compass, a new free publication built by the Kindle editorial team that we’re piloting to a small number of Kindle customers.

This email incorrectly referred to The Kindle Compass as a subscription with a free trial. We built it to always be free for customers, and you will never be charged for it. We apologize for any confusion.

If you wish to unsubscribe from the pilot for The Kindle Compass you can do so from a link in the last section of the magazine, or from the Manage Your Kindle Subscriptions page at www.amazon.com/manageyourkindlesubscriptions.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120105/kindle-owners-upset-after-receiving-cryptic-subscription-offer-from-amazon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111209/airbnb-hires-former-yahoo-legal-eagle-belinda-johnson-as-general-counsel/ http://allthingsd.com/20111209/airbnb-hires-former-yahoo-legal-eagle-belinda-johnson-as-general-counsel/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:44:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=152330

Airbnb, the San Francisco online vacation rentals start-up, said it has hired a key former Yahoo lawyer, Belinda Johnson, as its new general counsel.

The legal issues at Airbnb are both interesting and challenging, all around the new arena of global sharing or, as the company calls it, “collaborative consumption.”

Johnson is one of several recent major hires by Airbnb, which has been adding more seasoned execs to its team of late. Other recent key Airbnb hires include Monroe Labouisse as head of trust and safety and customer service, and Vivek Wagle as head of content.

Johnson left Yahoo several months ago as its deputy general counsel, after a long tenure there working on a wide variety of issues.

Among other things, she oversaw legal strategy for Yahoo’s global products, and worked on deals like its search and advertising alliance with Microsoft. Johnson came to Yahoo from its Web 1.0 acquisition of Broadcast.com, where she had served as general counsel.

She attended both college and law school at the University of Texas.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111209/airbnb-hires-former-yahoo-legal-eagle-belinda-johnson-as-general-counsel/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111024/oracle-grabs-rightnow-a-cloud-company-in-the-big-sky-state-for-1-4-billion/ http://allthingsd.com/20111024/oracle-grabs-rightnow-a-cloud-company-in-the-big-sky-state-for-1-4-billion/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:14:52 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=136068 Software giant Oracle just announced that it intends to acquire RightNow Technologies, a cloud software firm, in a deal that values RightNow at $1.43 billion.

Oracle said the deal, which it expects to close late this year or early next, pending stockholder and regulatory approvals, is worth about $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. Oracle offered $43 a share for RightNow, which, according to its latest quarterly filing, had 33.2 million shares outstanding.

RightNow’s specialty is what it calls a “Customer Service Cloud,” which it says helps companies step up their customer service experience, whether they’re running a call center, a customer service Web site, or a social network.

“Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including salesforce automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud,” Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development, said in a statement. “RightNow’s leading customer service cloud is a very important addition to Oracle’s Public Cloud.”

The move is also a direct challenge to Salesforce.com, which has in recent months been emphasizing its Service Cloud as a way to enhance customer service experiences, and to find and get ahead of problems before they blow up in public.

Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher says in a research note that Oracle’s move will ratchet up competitive pressure on Salesforce. Oracle has a stronger distribution channel and will be able to push RightNow directly to its existing customer base.

That may be. But here’s probably the best thing about RightNow: Its location. RightNow is based in Bozeman, Mont., which is about as unlikely a place to find a cloud software company as one can imagine. It’s located in a stupefyingly beautiful part of the country and about two hours away from Yellowstone National Park.

I lived in a neighboring town in Idaho for a few years and once stayed the night in Bozeman. I was pleasantly surprised, and have always intended to get back. The population is about 40,000. It was once the center of America’s canned-pea industry, but is now known as one of the best places to live if you’re a skier.

Or maybe fly-fishing is more your speed. Some of the scenes in “A River Runs Through It,” the 1992 film based on the Norman Maclean novel, were filmed in and around Bozeman. Just to give you an idea, I embedded a clip from that film’s most memorable scene:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111024/oracle-grabs-rightnow-a-cloud-company-in-the-big-sky-state-for-1-4-billion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110921/salesforce-pays-50m-for-assistly-customer-service-platform/ http://allthingsd.com/20110921/salesforce-pays-50m-for-assistly-customer-service-platform/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:01:18 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=123268 Salesforce said today it has acquired the customer service platform Assistly for $50 million in cash. Assistly helps companies manage customer service through various channels like Facebook, Twitter, chat, email and phone, and is a competitor to Zendesk. That marks the third (and biggest) acquisition in one day for Assistly investor True Ventures: WeGame was bought by Tagged and VodPod assets were bought by Lockerz.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110921/salesforce-pays-50m-for-assistly-customer-service-platform/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110901/ridiculously-transparent/ http://allthingsd.com/20110901/ridiculously-transparent/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:38:06 +0000 Scott Weiss http://allthingsd.com/?p=116270 I had a real struggle preparing to be a public company CEO. And it had little to do with having scalable internal systems or making the quarterly numbers: I just couldn’t keep secrets from my employees.

As CEO of IronPort, I wanted to be completely transparent with my entire team but my board of seasoned industry veterans was sharply opposed. They raised several serious issues: do you want to leak critical weaknesses to your competitors? Do you want to panic your employees? Do you want to completely reconstruct your culture when you go public? It was just a bad idea. However, the more that I thought about it, the more I believed that sharing absolutely everything would create massive advantages and that we should live with whatever consequences resulted.

So, after board meetings, we would assemble the company and go through every board slide. How much cash in the bank? What’s our burn rate? What are the biggest problems we are facing? Did we decide to build, buy or acquire a critical component? The first couple of go-rounds, there was dead silence. No questions — just heads nodding and a couple of blank stares. After some probing, we realized that people needed to feel comfortable speaking up, that it didn’t just come naturally. We brainstormed a bunch of different ways to get over this hurdle and here were some experiments that ultimately worked:

• We amped up the frequency of communication to all employees. Different members of the leadership team would send out weekly emails to all about customer trips, conferences attended, schedules slips and customer issues. These were written very off-the-cuff, informal and in the voice of the different leaders. I suppose we’d be all be tweeting or blogging these days.
• When an employee would reply to an email with a comment or question, we treated it like it came from a customer who deserved an immediate, detailed and thoughtful response.
• After the weekly staff meetings, we’d send out a summary of the decisions and issues to all of the directors/managers who would then share it with their teams.
• We emphasized “speaking up” as a core value at every opportunity. Our employee orientation, performance reviews and leadership training all emphasized everyone having an obligation to dissent.
• We would leave 30 minutes for questions after every all-hands meeting and then press, often uncomfortably, for no fewer than five questions from the group.

Over time, the benefits of transparency coupled with an emerging cultural norm of speaking up became more apparent:

I thought we would surface creative answers faster. When everyone had a clear understanding of the hard problems, their collective brains were on the table for parallel processing. The best information rarely sat with the senior executives but with the employees who were closest to the product and closest to the customers. And the best answers would often come from the most unlikely of places. For example, some of our most innovative features came from customer support reps identifying customers trying to use the product in ways it wasn’t intended.

Initially, it worked better than we expected. IronPort experienced zero voluntary turnover for the first three years. Because we let everyone’s head under the tent, we implicitly trusted them and it worked both ways. For instance, it wasn’t a shocker when we stopped hiring as we were raising money. Everyone knew exactly what was going on: we were running low on cash and had no idea how long the process would last.

Lastly, nobody was confused about what was important and people would point out any inconsistencies and solve them in the background. I remember standing up at a company meeting talking about how excited I was that IronPort anti-spam was working and we’d finally be able to drop our partner Brightmail. After the meeting, the accounts receivable clerk knocked on my door and said, “I thought you should know that two customers are withholding payment because IronPort anti-spam isn’t performing.” Oh crap. But much better to know about it and fix it than go on believing there wasn’t a problem.

As we were preparing to file our S-1, we hired a CFO with public company experience who insisted that we start “practicing” as a public company. Hmm — I knew that our level of transparency would have to change but what did that mean exactly? “You can’t tell everyone how we did this quarter at midnight quarter-end” and “You can’t go through all the board slides like that — too much sensitive information.” So, we started editing, putting shrouds on issues because we were afraid that the information would leak. I remember our first all-hands during the “practice” time. I felt muzzled and cautious, trying to strike a balance between our wonderful transparent culture and an intricate set of Sarbanes-Oxley rules. As it turned out, the practice was critical in working out the kinks. Here are a few things we did:

• Our CFO and I listened to dozens of public company earnings calls to get a sense for the dynamic and what information was typically shared. The best duos had the CFO as the play-by-play man and the CEO as the color commentator.
• We then staged mock earnings calls with the employees as the analysts asking the questions. This proved to be a very useful format for reining in my over-sharing and was instructive to the employees as they saw us struggle with what we could and couldn’t reveal.
• We prepared a mock earnings press release a few weeks after the quarter closed. This helped us practice keeping the numbers quiet, which was difficult because everyone wanted to know how we did at quarter-end.

Although we eventually opted for an acquisition by Cisco versus an IPO, I came to believe that our type of total transparency was a competitive weapon that applied primarily to private companies. In the end, my board members were right — we did have to limit what we shared with employees on the way to going public. That said, I believe it was much healthier to set the default to full disclosure while we were private. When you prepare for an IPO, it’s definitely a high-class problem to have to work backwards with concrete reasons to withhold information from the employees. And when that time comes, they totally understand.

Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He most recently was vice president and general manager of the security technology group for Cisco Systems. He also co-founded and was CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110901/ridiculously-transparent/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110322/parature-specialist-in-cloud-based-customer-service-challenges-salesforce-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20110322/parature-specialist-in-cloud-based-customer-service-challenges-salesforce-com/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:34:25 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4226 As something of an adjunct to all the activity around “social enterprise software” these days, there’s been in recent weeks a lot of movement around software that’s aimed at helping companies get a handle on their customer service experience.

People who do business with you want to talk about your brand wherever they happen to hang out online. That may be on a Web forum somewhere or it may be on Facebook and Twitter. A few weeks ago we saw Salesforce.com unveil its Service Cloud 3, which aims to do a lot of that, but it’s not the only game in town.

Parature, a venture-backed player in the business of what it calls the cloud-based customer-engagement software business, is today announcing a significant update it’s calling Spring 11. The point of the software is to reduce the cost and time commitment required to answer the same support questions over and over. The company added support for Facebook earlier this year, allowing customer support teams to track discussions and engage consumers there. Today it’s adding support both for Twitter and for Lithium web communities.

“Our vision here is that you have to be where your customers are,” Duke Chung, Parature founder and chief strategy officer, told me. “When we started supporting Facebook we saw a lot of traction there, but more and more we look at our business as making sure we help our customers connect to wherever they are.”

Chung says he thinks Parature is the only vendor out there able to integrate all these channels into one product. Salesforce added a lot of social aspects to Service Cloud 3, but a key piece of that is a Radian6 app for monitoring blogs and forums that is not expected to hit the Salesforce App Exchange until August of this year. Salesforce monitoring for Twitter is up and running, while Salesforce for Facebook is coming during the second quarter of this year. On balance, Parature looks ahead of Salesforce for now.

Another new feature generates two automatic answers based on the customer’s submitted question. The more you can reduce the number of one-to-one conversations, the more you reduce the overall cost of customer support.

Another new feature is the analysis of search terms. Parature users can analyze the service experience by looking at what people are searching for. That helps support personnel detect patterns and can speed up and improve support responses, plus serving as an early warning system for problems with a product or service.

Parature is backed by Accel Partners, Sierra Ventures and Valhalla Partners, and is used to support 25 million customers around the world. Its customers include language-training software company Rosetta Stone, IGN Entertainment and Hitachi.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110322/parature-specialist-in-cloud-based-customer-service-challenges-salesforce-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/assistly-extends-customer-service-to-facebook-walls/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 18:08:59 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3669 When something breaks, we users ask for help wherever we think we can find someone responsible. Or maybe we just stand up on our social media soapbox and whine.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

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