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Transcript: Thor Muller - Satisfaction
Aaron Strout:
Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show.
Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions. This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."
And of course, we do appreciate your comments. You're welcome to dial me at (781) 328-2824, or e-mail me: aaron AT mzinga DOT com.
Today’s guest is Thor Muller, who is the founder and CEO of Satisfaction. Welcome, Thor.
Thor Muller:
Thank you. Good to be here.
Aaron Strout:
We look forward to finding out a little bit more about you. For the listeners who are dialing in, I did have the opportunity to meet Thor at Forum One’s recent marketing and online communities conference down in New York City. He gave one of the talks down there. He was focusing on how to manage your brand when customers control the message.
I thought his message was quite fascinating, and what his company, Satisfaction, does is quite fascinating, so we wanted to have him on here to be able to talk to you. With no further ado, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself other than me just giving your title and your company, so that we can give the listeners a better feel for who you are, Thor?
Thor Muller:
Sure. Well, I’ve been in digital media web stuff since the mid-‘90s. I started in a first-generation web development consultancy called Profit Communications and later sold that to Frog Design, where I set up their digital media practice, focused on the Internet. There was another startup called Trapezo, and another web development consultancy called Rubyred Labs.
Throughout all of this, I think I learned a lot, and it’s culminated in this business, which I call Satisfaction, which is focused on what we called "people-powered customer service."
Aaron Strout:
Now talk about this. You have a fascinating business model, and we were chatting a little bit about this in our pre-call. You have a concept of putting the customer at the center of the conversation. I think unlike some of the traditional – and this is certainly not a knock against any of the other sites, like Amazon or Dell or Intuit, where they have somewhat siloed product conversations and communities where customers can talk about, you know, ask questions about certain products and things like that. You really sort of start with the customer first, and then let them talk about the products that they have, and ask questions and answer questions. Is that correct?
Thor Muller:
Yeah. Just to frame it, we have this web service at GetSatisfaction.com that anyone can use for free, where they can ask questions, report problems, share ideas around all the products that they use and care about. Our big idea was we invent customer service as a community where satisfaction is like a Switzerland for companies and their customers. Nobody owns the conversation – not the company, not the customers. It’s something that exists between them, and so we wanted to create something which, in fact, as you mentioned, takes it out of that silo and puts the customer at the center so that they can participate across the products and services that they use.
Aaron Strout:
I was just gonna ask you – so it sounds fascinating. How do you monetize this? It’s one of the things that I know a lot of companies grapple with when they talk about communities, and certainly there’s the brand element and there’s the deepening relationships with customers. How do you guys, in particular, find that you can create value for the companies? I mean, do they sort of sponsor this? Do they get a brand benefit? How do you look at that?
Thor Muller:
Yeah, absolutely. Ultimately, the value proposition is two ways: the customers and the end customers, and its companies. We were experiencing that the benefits are huge [inaudible] who are used to these expensive mechanized customer support systems. Our value proposition is to dramatically reduce repetitive support tasks by dramatically increasing user engagement. We provide tools on top of this open community that allow companies to get business value out of that. Sometimes that means better tools for communicating to the audience. For instance, we have the ability for our companies to participate with an official representative, where they can mark replies as the official reply, and that goes to the very top of the page, so they’re able to establish an authority within this community.
We also are rolling out tools where companies can embed these community conversations into their own sites, and actually make this their customer support platform. That’s where it gets really interesting, because on the one hand, you have the customer at the center, participating across the various products they use and making it really easy for them to reduce the friction, to ask the questions of not just the company, but their entire community.
On the other side, you have companies who are able to frame a specific set of conversations that are about them, and really foster that authenticity in the interaction with those users.
Aaron Strout:
Fascinating model, and I think a real value. We build community ourselves for customers, and it is one of the things that’s always tricky – trying to sort of explain to customers how do you participate in larger communities, whether it’s a Facebook thing or maybe like an organization specifically, versus building it yourself, and we do build and advocate building customer communities. I think there’s a benefit to both, and it’s nice, because it does seem like you have a strategy that straddles those two, whether it’s your open community where there’s a lot of benefit, and then also plugging it into their site.
Thor Muller:
Yeah. I think the value is that the Web is a network of many nodes, and the linkages between those nodes are often more interesting and important than the nodes themselves. We fully recognize that there’s going to be any number of places where customers and companies are interactive, and you want to foster that. For instance, our approach – we have several approaches, ranging from providing widgets that can be embedded in other places, to opening up our API, so that some of these conversations and interactions can live fully integrated in other systems, perhaps your communities.
Aaron Strout:
No, and that’s certainly a possibility. We could talk more about this offline, but one of the things that we’re gonna be offering in Q1 of next year is a self-service model of our community. So today, we have a full-service model that we offer, and we do all the management, we do the design work, etc, up front, but there’s a fee that comes attached with it, and then the monthly fee is certainly bigger. We have had a number of clients that say, “Look, guys. We just want to do it ourselves. We’d like you to get us started.” One of the things that comes with that that’s critical is really this whole customer service bend, and how do you accomplish that and how do you get people who are qualified to answer questions? It’s certainly something that we might be interested down the road.
Sort of transitioning to our next question, which leverages a little bit of what we’ve been talking about, and that is companies in general – so outside of what you guys do. You’ve lived in the space for a while and you see a lot of different people. I know you and I were talking about Twitter and Facebook and keeping on top of what’s going on. Any company or companies that you see doing a good job right now with social media or their community efforts?
Thor Muller:
Well, I think that this is a time of great exploration by many companies, and there are those who are early adopters and those who are laggards. But it’s easiest to find companies that have had a blowup of some sort and see how they handled it, because that’s really the great litmus test. It’s easy to be transparent when things are going well. It’s much more difficult to do so when things are going badly. I really liked how Jet Blue, how the CEO – actually, former CEO of Jet Blue – handled the fiasco last February when they had many planes sitting on winter tarmacs, and their passengers were stuck inside these planes for 12 hours with the toilets overflowing. In response, after it had been resolved, he issued official apologies through the normal channels – e-mails, Web sites – but what I thought was really interesting was when he created a YouTube video, and posted it to YouTube and left the comments on. That took a lot of courage because –
Aaron Strout:
You get a lot of angry customers. I remember that –
Thor Muller:
A tremendous amount of anger towards him, but by embracing that anger rather than fighting it, by saying, “You have a right to be angry, and I’m giving you a platform for expressing that, and it’s not even a platform that we control.” He, I think, really changed the nature of that conversation to their advantage. I see that kind of judo move, you know, pull when people are pushing, working quite well. When companies fight it, by contrast, there’s a lot of examples of that –
Aaron Strout:
Yeah, iPhone, I think, did that as well, and maybe not through social media as much, but with the whole price reduction. You know, they could have just ignored it and they didn’t,. And they sort of embraced it and said, “Look, we’re sorry,” and I think did a good job at putting messages in a lot of different places, a lot of different listening posts, and really sort of encouraging people to do things –
Thor Muller:
A lot of it is speed, responding at the speed of the network. You can’t wait around. In fact, I know that some companies now have rapid-response teams that are monitoring various public discussion spaces. If there’s an emerging problem of any scale, they’ll jump right on it because they know that the earlier they respond, the more likelihood that they can keep the tone positive. Things spin out of control really fast and become vicious cycles. If they get in there early, they become virtuous cycles where people positively discuss the company for their willingness to be real.
Dell is another example of a company that had, I think, plummeting satisfaction scores a couple of years ago, even as recently as a year ago. They really had a come-to-Jesus moment where they knew that they needed to do something different. Seven or eight months ago, they launched a series of social media platforms, including *http://www.dellideastorm.com/* Idea Storm, which really embraced the community as the source of innovation, basically saying, “We don’t know all the answers. We need you. We’re only as good as the goodwill that you provide us,” and they’re now beginning to pivot their business to be more customer-centric. I think that signs like that, examples like that, really point the direction for where best practices are.
Aaron Strout:
That’s helpful. I think you’ve sort of answered the last question that I was gonna ask you, and that is: What is the best practice for a company that’s thinking about launching a community initiative? If I’m saying this correctly, it sounds like we pointed to really providing a channel for people to give honest and open feedback. In the case of Jet Blue, it adds sort of a cathartic element to it. Speed, because that way you can nip things in the bud, and also show people that you care. Then I think a little bit of humility in the case of Dell that you’re talking about, where it is that admittance of, “Guys, we don’t know everything, and you know what, we have a lot of smart customers. Probably some customers that are smarter than we are, and we’d love to hear from you, and here’s a vehicle to be able to do it.”
Thor Muller:
Yeah. Yeah, and then the final one, which is the most important, is just standing for something, something significant. Because at the end of the day, people will cut you a lot more slack when you have a clear mission to do good in the world, or to embody some character. I think that’s the thing that the really standout companies that others – All the other best practices aside, if you don’t have a purpose beyond just making money, then it’s hard for people to identify. I think that’s the most important one, but granted, the one which is the hardest.
Aaron Strout:
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I love that one, and that is the hardest because you might say, “Well, gee, every company stands for something,” but I think you’re right. More often than not, it’s easy to get distracted, particularly in the social media space. I think that you can sort of want to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but keeping true to your mission and really standing by it is the best practice.
Thor Muller:
Exactly.
Aaron Strout:
Great. Well, Thor, I really appreciate your time today. We touched on some good topics. I know we did it in rapid fire. I appreciate you taking your time out of your busy schedule to do it.
Thor Muller:
My pleasure. It’s been great.
Aaron Strout:
We appreciate you listening in to this series of the We Show podcasts. To find other podcasts like this, you can check out *http://www.wearesmarter.org/* WeAreSmarter.org, *http://www.mzinga.com/* Mzinga.com, and also *http://www.iTunes.com/* iTunes under "We Are Smarter."
Thanks so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next week.
Tue, Nov 20 2007
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