Nevahold is a platform where people rally together to get the attention of large companies. Users compose a “shout” and share it with the community to rally support for their cause. Other members of the community can join in the action by sharing on their social media accounts. The ultimate goal is that enough people participate to elicit a response.

“In today’s culture of huge, faceless companies, chances are high that you’ve hit the hair-pulling, mind-numbing, high-pitched-screeching frustration of overpaying for services, buying cheap quality products, being hit with hidden fees, dealing with the worst of customer service skills, or not even getting through to customer service and staying on an endless elevator-music hold cycle,” said cofounder Kena Amoah to VentureBeat. “Nevahold allows consumers to crowd source their social media accounts to harness their power and increase their influence when reaching out to a company.”

Consumers are increasingly turning to social media as a means to express their gripes, grievances, and appreciation for products and services. On the other end, businesses across the board are using social media to connect with consumers and for customer service support. Nevahold’s goal is to give consumers as much efficacy as possible when reaching out to these companies and is based on the principle of “strength in numbers.”

On Nevahold, people send their shout to a company’s social media contact and wait 30 minutes for a response. A shout can include photos, videos, or be a simple comment. If the company is radio silent, then advocates start to retweet an share the shout until the company responds. If the company still doesn’t respond, the question is shared one all of Nevahold’s 12 social media channels.

Nevahold gives each company a customer service score based on their response rates and time. The compare tool helps consumer see how different companies fare side-by-side. There is also a campaign feature that consumers can use to petition for a change in the company’s policy or service.

Amoah said that during beta testing, Nevahold has helped resolve 23,990 questions and complaints in the airline, wireless, and consumer electronics industry and had a 91.5 percent response rate. It recently helped students traveling to a conference stand up against American Airlines and against Barclays U.K.

The three founders met at the Meltwater School of Technology in Ghana. Meltwater Foundation has invested $90,000. Competitors include Gripevine, Gri.pe and Publikdemand.

Peter Shankman is the founder of The Geek Factory and author of “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Out, and Collaboration is In.”

In the 80s, in the days of Michael Milken and Gordon Gekko, the rule on the street was “eat your young.” Nice guys finish last, hold your information, keep the rules to yourself, and win at all costs, no matter who you have to trample.

Today, with the advent of mobile technology and 24-hour-connectivity, those days are long gone. And those who have yet to realize that are on their way to being eliminated. If your company isn’t “nice” from the top down, not only will your profits will suffer, but you’ll actually spend more money on marketing than you have to.

We live in the “sharing era.” People share for two reasons: To share happiness with a slight tinge of smug (oh, check out this photo of the room upgrade the Westin just gave me!) or to share disappointment, with the logic that someone isn’t truly miserable about their situation until they’ve made everyone around them miserable, as well.

(Listen to the cell phone conversations the next time your flight lands three hours late.)

We share more now than ever before simply because we can. Every phone is a broadband ticket to immediacy, with the ability to upload statuses, photos, and videos to the world in real-time.

Thus, want to improve your marketing and drop your costs? Teach your employees to treat their customers one level above crap.

Let’s face it – in addition to being a society of sharers, we’re also a society that expects to be treated like crap. You expect the fast food place to screw up your order, you expect your exit-row window seat to be replaced by a middle seat in the last row of the plane. We expect to be treated like crap, because it’s what customer service has generally become.

But, being nice can change all of that. When the rest of the world treats their customers like crap, treating yours one level above can make all the difference. And it doesn’t even have to be above and beyond (although that’s nice, too) but just one level above.

I walked into a hotel last month, having been delayed four hours in getting there. I had no status at that hotel, and half expected my room to be given away. Instead, I was greeted by name, and offered a hot towel. This wasn’t a five star hotel, it was a regular chain. They’d seen my flight information, and noticed I was late, and took it upon themselves to not only hold my room, but give me a brief sense of relief when I arrived. That hot towel made all the difference, and you can bet that my followers and friends knew about it immediately. That personal recommendation is what will drive new customers.

The key to being nice is focusing on the customers you have, letting them get you the new customers you want. Think about it – if one level above crap results in someone telling their friends how impressed they were, that impression will translate into new customers: “Well, Peter stayed there and really enjoyed it, I’ll go there, too.” This is TRUE marketing, and even more importantly, it’s BELIEVABLE marketing. It comes from a place of trust. This is worth more than any media buy, or any PR firm hit you could ever hope to get.

This works in any industry, whether B2B or B2C. Face it – in B2B, companies don’t buy. Someone at that company does. That’s the person to whom you want to be nice.

And even more importantly, it’s not about sucking up – it’s about treating customers with a level of respect they don’t expect. It’s about training your employees from top down as to why this is important, and most importantly, it’s about giving your front-line employees the ability to do this …explaining to them that you’re empowering them to make the company better and to do little things that go a long way, whether it’s topping off an order with a little something extra at no charge, or upgrading a room to a bigger one because it’s available.

And know this: The ROI you’ll get from these will almost ALWAYS be higher than the margins on the profit you’d make by not doing it.

The call to the enlightened CEO is this: The old “kill your young” way of doing business is over. Without joining this new movement of “nice,” your business will simply fade away. More than ever, consumers have the ability to choose with whom they want to do business. And with those choices being made more and more from the recommendations of those within our personal network, the chances of maintaining the old school “they’ll get it the way we like it” mentality and still keeping your customers is growing slimmer by the day.

The new age of being nice starts with your CEO, and goes down the chain to the front line employees. The last two years of research for my book have proved it: Nice companies really DO finish first.

Peter Shankman is the founder of The Geek Factory, Inc., a Marketing and Customer Service agency with clients worldwide. His third book, “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Out, and Collaboration is in,” hits stores on April 2.

photo credit: BenSpark via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Rado Kotorov is the chief innovation officer for BI and analytics provider Information Builders.

VP Marketing: “Siri, should I open this email?”

Siri: “Don’t. Your boss sounds very angry. And, by the way, the tone of the email that you are writing to the product management team is very negative. Please change it.”

Many people delegate more and more to Siri (the electronic genie ‘in’ the iPhone) – from dialing phone numbers and finding directions, to taking dictation for SMS and emails. What if Siri could help us modulate the emotional tone of our messages? Would it make the world a better place with less conflict and argument, or would it leave piles of unread messages?

Perhaps, but to be able to help in this aspect Siri will have to learn to do sentiment analysis: read text and determine its emotional charge.

Today, there is a lot of hype and buzz about sentiment analysis even without Siri’s involvement. Like any new technology it has its advocates and its skeptics. And since the technology is in the early stages of evolution the skeptics can find plenty of failures and the proponents plenty of hope.

Let us start with the skeptics.

Emotions are perceived as uniquely human and difficult to read even by human beings. The Spanish philosopher Unamuno believed that emotions distinguished humans from the animal world —  he had never seen a cat crying! So how can a machine accurately predict the emotions in messages?

The problem is further exacerbated by the subtleties of language and expressions, by unwritten but implied insinuations in short messages, by the symbols and abbreviations that constantly change and evolve in social media posts, and by the fact that messages can express more than one emotion. All of these are perfectly valid concerns and problems that do not have definite solutions today.

The ‘mad’ scientists argue that these are minor issues raised by those uninitiated in the arts of semantic analysis. And they have stacks of papers, journals, books, examples, programs, and so on to show you how machines are as smart as people in understanding and assessing written and spoken language. But is it so? Didn’t HP just write off $8 billion from the acquisition of Autonomy — the company that pioneered semantic search and was promising to be able to read and understand text better than lawyers do?

Isn’t this an admission that we are not quite there yet?

I think that both sides are wrong and a more pragmatic approach that recognizes both the needs and the limitations is more beneficial. The driver for sentiment analysis is early detection of warning signs and opportunities. Detecting that a customer is getting very frustrated with customer service can be used to prevent customer churn, and detecting early that negative posts have the potential of going viral can trigger a counter action to prevent severe reputational damage.

The reason why we are seeking the help of machines is because the volume of online communications is so large that organizations cannot put enough employees to sift through all of them.  Naturally when there is a need, people will be looking for solutions … and hype and skepticism are corollaries to every search for a solution.

So what do I think is the practical solution given these limitations?

Industry-wide, we know that sentiment scores can be assigned to about 40% to 50% of messages. Essentially, sentiment analysis allows us to classify accurately messages at both ends of the bell curve, the extremely positive and the extremely negative. Given the human condition, very angry messages have simply a very angry tone. And the focus of the messages is directed entirely to the expression of the strong frustration. The same is true for the very happy messages. So we can safely claim that the technology will help us to filter the messages at both tails of the bell curve, and this is not a small gain.

Now let us figure how to further augment it, so that we can gain more insight. What if we pair sentiment analysis with search technologies? In other words, we assign sentiment to a message, but also index all the messages in a search index. Then, once we find an angry message, search can show us related messages. It is true that those messages will be related by content, but even an inexperienced user can quickly sift through similar messages and pick up the ones that are of interest.

Let us take it one step further.

Search already comes packed with sophisticated analyzers that can extract words from text. Those words and their frequencies can be displayed in various visualizations — tag clouds, lexical diversity graphs, streaming graphs. With this enhancement a user can filter the messages on sentiment (detecting the most angry ones), see the related messages (using search), analyze the aggregate word distributions in the related messages (using text graphs) and drill down on the graphs to further filter the messages. At the end they can read the few remaining messages and know exactly both the sentiment and the content.

The combination of the three technologies allows analysis in fractions of a second to detect cases that need attention. And this is operationally invaluable without being outrageously esoteric.

Siri, can you save me some time?

photo credit: IntelFreePress via photopin cc

And you thought Amazon reviews were interesting. Today, StellaService has just taken a huge $15 million dollar check to the bank, and all for its capability to track and rate the online shopping experience.

This round of funding is the New York City-based startup’s second institutional financing. Altogether, it’s raised $22 million since its founding in 2009. Norwest Venture Partners led today’s funding; NVP general partner Josh Goldman will take a board seat. Previous investors include DFJ Gotham (Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s NYC branch) and RRE Ventures.

Currently, StellaService helps big retail customers like GNC, 1-800-Contacts, and Eddie Bauer to understand and improve how they rate with online shoppers — and how those ratings compare to those of their competitors.

StellaService uses analysts, accountants, and mystery shoppers to “stress test” all the many points of contact between customers and brands online, such as processing returns and engaging in Twitter conversations.

“Not only does StellaService capture how we are performing against the customer service targets we’ve set for ourselves,” said an Eddie Bauer sales SVP in a statement on the news. “We know where we stand amongst the leading retailers and where the best in class perform across key customer service metrics. This insight pushes Eddie Bauer to continually make improvements to be the best.”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

NEW YORK CITY — Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might not be the best spokesperson for friendly customer service. He’s known for his brash, off-the-cuff comments and leading an aggressive campaign to bring cloud to the enterprise.

But at an event today in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, Benioff talked quite a bit about communicating with customers and helping companies bridge connections with people through every channel imaginable. Salesforce is now prioritizing “how to be a customer company.”

“When we are connecting to each other, its about the how — how we are connecting,” Benioff said. “The customer revolution is also a trust revolution. And that changes everything.”

Benioff used the stage today to spotlight new additions to Salesforce’s Service Cloud. The big focus of the announcement is that companies can use Service Cloud to connect with customers on mobile devices in four new ways — direct chat in mobile apps, Communities (forums) inside mobile apps, Service Cloud Touch optimized for mobile devices, and co-browsing.

He said there were many questions that needed to be asked by companies looking to connect with customers and partners.

“How do you listen to every customer?” Benioff said. “How do I engage them on every channel? How do I service customers through the retail store? How do I create communities? How do you connect every partner? How do you connect every product? How do you deliver apps everywhere?”

Benioff cited the “Obama for America” presidential campaign as one of the best examples of how Salesforce had helped an organization connect with people.

That team used Salesforce’s Service Cloud, Chatter, and Platform to help stay connected with employees, registered voters, and leads (in this case, potential voters).

“The election in 2008, I think, was a lot about social media and social networks” Benioff said. “In 2012, it was different. … I downloaded the Obama app and it tells me, ‘These are five people you need to call that aren’t registered to vote.’”

Benioff trotted out Michael Salby, the chief innovation officer for Obama for America, and Vivek Kundra, who was the first CIO for the United States and now a Salesforce executive, as examples of people who had taken advantage of communities and understood how to build customer relationships.

On top of pushing a new “trust revolution” through service channels, Benioff said that social media and networking were clearly another part of delivering on that promise. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud includes acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6, and it uses those tools to help clients better communicate with and track people.

Unilever CIO Willem Eelman talked briefly about how it has used Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud tools to build better relationships.

“Clearly, it’s showing how technology can solve problems for them,” Eelman said. “You have to engage and build trust.”

Benioff also used his stage time to espouse the benefits of location awareness (GPS connectivity to apps) and touch optimization (touchscreens and apps for those screens) as ways to build trust.

“I used to talk about the mobile revolution — now it’s the touch revolution,” “I was at CES and it’s pervasive. … The concept of touch is transforming everything. Touch computers, touch laptops, touch everything.”

As a kid, I loved to fill out customer surveys. I would drive my mother crazy by agonizing over the questions and whether to award a business 3 or 4 stars. The days of paper questionnaires may be long gone, but there are companies digitalizing the process so online businesses can receive feedback as well.

WebEngage is a Mumbai-based startup that enables companies to gather customer insight and promote user engagement. It has launched a completely redesigned site and announced raising over $500K in seed funding.

The technology powers the delivery of questionnaires to specific audiences. Using the software, companies can build their own feedback and support forms and embed them on their site. They can then filter which visitors they would like to target with these surveys, for example people coming from a Google search or someone who spent at least a minute on a page. All the collected data is turned into actionable analytic reports.

WebEngage clients can also create filters for push notifications. They dictate certain parameters, such as repeat visitors or users in the shopping cart drop-off phase, and these people will receive targeted messages. The service is implemented through a Javascript API.

Over the past year, the company has added 4200 customers from around the world. The investors include GTI Capital, Indian Angel Network, and Blume Ventures, Rajan Anandan and Jonathan Schulhof. WebEngage is currently a team of six.

I wasn’t the first person abused by an airline’s customer service. But I was one of the first to show how one person, armed with creativity, some friends, $150, and the Internet, could turn an entire industry upside down (if you don’t remember my story, check out United Breaks Guitars).

The reaction to my airline experience proves that today, thanks to social media, any individual has incredible reach and unlimited potential to be heard. The implications of this are massive in the areas of customer service, social media and branding and I’m grateful for the many opportunities I continue to enjoy presenting this message around the world.

When United Breaks Guitars went viral I quickly discovered that customer service in North America is a $120 billion/year industry.  With all of those resources being invested in improving service efficiencies I continue to be blown away by the amount of poor customer service offered by both big and small companies. In many ways the idea of improving customer service has been over-thought and over analyzed when the solution to many problems facing companies today has been staring them in the face all along.

One of the key takeaways from my story has to do with the fact that many large corporations support a culture of “statistical insignificance”. That’s when the target for customer satisfaction is anything other than 100%, all of the time. Sometimes companies shoot for “mostly right, most of the time” as an acceptable standard of customer service and essentially marginalize some percentage of their customers. For instance, at an annual general meeting a CEO may congratulate a customer service department for hitting a 95% satisfaction rating and so the remaining 5% who, were served poorly or left unsatisfied, just became acceptable losses. That kind of thinking wasn’t so perilous before social media because those remaining 5% had a difficult time being heard.

Those days are long gone. I was one of those marginalized few and for $150 my music video became the #1 YouTube music video in the world for a month. Over 150 million people have heard my story through traditional media and online forums and it is believed to have affected the stock price of United Airlines by millions of dollars in market capitalization.

The very best companies with the best of intentions will have customer service failures since mistakes and unforeseen circumstances will present themselves in every business. But what kind of company do you want to do business with?  Do you want to support a company that shoots to please every customer, or one that sets satisfaction targets at “lots; more than last year; or as many as possible”?

The difference between aiming for perfection and aiming for acceptable levels of failure defines a company and, I believe, will determine which ones will be relevant five years from today. In the age of social media, where everyone has potential to be heard, companies cannot afford the fallout of people with truly horrible customer service stories sharing them with millions of others.  It not only tarnishes the company brand, but it takes resources to undo the damage and solve a problem that likely didn’t need to happen in the first place.  If your company supports this idea of statistical insignificance, it is essentially fueling the fire of its own demise.

The reason for this is, in the face of a customer service failure, the reaction of the company that tries to please everyone will be radically different than the one that doesn’t.  The former will take it seriously, will respond quickly, apologize, and ask how they can resolve issues. Businesses that shoot for 100% aren’t happy with a 99 and are therefore motivated to make things right.  As a result the customer in question will likely not feel confrontational and is more likely to accept an apology as authentic.  They are also more likely to agree to a faster, less costly resolution and be so impressed with your recovery effort that they will become better brand ambassadors than they were before. This is called the Customer Service Paradox.

The other company however, will simply accept that some customers can’t be satisfied or that it was that customer’s bad luck to be in the marginalized few that day.  These consumers find themselves in frustrating mazes, having to explain their stories endlessly while becoming angrier in the process. If an apology comes, it is not backed up with action so it appears contrived and the whole process becomes extremely confrontational with both sides digging in, looking for a one-sided win.

Not only has this company lost this customer from possibly many years of patronage but they are paying hourly wages to their customer service employees to keep them unsatisfied. In these instances the company determines what they aren’t paying to resolve a bad experience as a savings. What they aren’t factoring in is the potential costs of losing this customer and all of the customers they may turn away if this story resonates with them.

The culture of statistical insignificance has to end and the power of one voice in the age of social media will usher it out the door. As all companies begin to understand the need to embrace social media as the opportunity that it is, many will also have to question outdated policies and tactics, like shooting for “mostly right”, and understand that every one of us has a voice, that no one is insignificant and that each of us deserve the best experience a business can offer.

Dave Carroll is an award-winning singer-songwriter, professional speaker, author and social media innovator. His 2009 YouTube music video ‘United Breaks Guitars’ became a worldwide sensation. Dave is now co-founder of the consumer resolution complaint platform, Gripevine.com. Most recently, Dave published his first book: “United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media”.

Original protest image via Shutterstock

In the future, sitting on hold for hours listening to a robotic-sounding “customer-support rep” tell that you your call “matters,” will be a thing of the past.

Today’s tech startups are already setting themselves apart by offering fast and headache-free customer support. As a result, the online helpdesk business is growing with companies like Beetil (acquired by Citrix this month) and Gripevine (a customer complaints service) offering new services.

The next contender in the space is SupportBee, a startup founded in 2010. Launching today, its service should make it easier for companies to answer customer support tickets via email in record time. SupportBee functions as an online helpdesk for Gmail support. The customers that are already using the beta are tech startups and small to medium-sized businesses. It does not support Outlook, typically used by larger companies.

SupportBee is already in use by over a dozen customers. It replaces complicated ticket states, audit trails, and many other complexities. Any member of a team can access the web app it at any time to help customers or learn more about product issues and feature requests.

Companies can get started by forwarding their support email to SupportBee and/or by installing a widget on their website. They then add their entire team to the desk and start replying to customer email. The team can customize their helpdesk further by setting up signatures and autoresponders and can automate ticket routing using filters. For companies looking for more functionality, SupportBee offers an API and supports webhooks.

The founders are experimenting with a new pricing model for their service. SupportBee does not charge customers on a per-seat basis; instead, it bases fees on the volume of tickets a company receives. This means that if a problem requires the support of an entire team, SupportBee’s customers won’t have to worry about escalating costs. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

Based in India and Vietnam, the founders are working remotely on the company. This isn’t their first startup — cofounders Prateek Dayal and Nithya Rajaram developed Muziboo.com, a free music upload tool, and AboutMyBrowser.com, a service to help customer support agents debug browser issues. Dayal also hosts HackerStreet, a tech news site for entrepreneurs in India.

While working on Muziboo, the founders told me they first experienced the pain of doing customer support for a user base of half a million and growing. “We could not keep up with the interactions using Gmail,” said Dayal, who said that existing tools were “slow, complicated and impersonal.”

SupportBee is primarily a bootstrapped effort — company has only raised a $40,000 equity grant from Startup Chile.

Top Image via Shutterstock

Even in our consumer-driven culture, the customer is always right.

Medallia has developed software that analyzes data about customer experiences. Today, the company announced raising $35 million for its technology, which measures customer feedback and provides insights that can serve to increase satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

Using text analytics, data mining, and visualization, the platform looks at relevant content from the web, phones, SMS, mobile devices, and social networks. It closely tracks customer response to whatever services they are receiving, and empowers the businesses to quickly react to that feedback.

“Medallia’s software gathers customer feedback, either solicited survey feedback from stores, call centers and websites, or unsolicited social reviews and comments,” said CEO Borge Hald. “Managing this feedback in real time gives our customers a competitive advantage. They can instantly identify and respond to unhappy customers to reduce churn, invite their biggest fans to become more vocal advocates online, and they use feedback to inform new and better products and services.” 

Two of its most used products are the Social Feedback for Hospitality and Mobile Feedback solutions. The company will be announcing new products next week. Medallia is used by 100 brands around the world, across a number of sectors including financial services, hospitality, and high-tech. Clients include Four Seasons, Sherwin-Williams, Honeywell, Sephora, Toyota Financial Services, and Sony EU.

This round of investment came entirely from Sequoia Capital and will enable Medallia to create more solutions and continue expansion.

Medallia is in Palo Alto, Calif. Read the press release. 

Customer service software maker Zendesk is today showing off a brand new version of its interface and features. It’s also taking advantage of this moment in the spotlight to tout a hefty new round of funding: $60 million from a really swell collection of VCs.

First, the new app.

Zendesk’s cloud-based customer service software was redesigned to remove some of its rough, enterprise-y edges. The new app was intended to look, feel, and function more like consumer apps.

The company said in a statement on the relaunch that the UI was inspired by “the best of social media and consumer application single-page design.” Zendesk wanted to build the Facebook for the enterprise, as it were.

The new app features in-app tabs and sub-tabs, instant/autocomplete search results, keyboard shortcuts, and relatively easy integration with instant messaging, social networks, web forums, and Ye Olde Telephone.

Speaking of telephones, Zendesk two weeks ago also announced it was breaking into mobile apps — another consumer-app direction it hopes will lead to enterprise-app success.

(Developer side note: Zendesk tells us this launch is also the largest deployment to date for Ember, the ergonomically enhanced JavaScript framework.)

Here’s what she looks like:

Next, the funding news. The $60 million comes to Zendesk via a long string of investors. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with participation from Index Ventures and GGV Capital as well as Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank. Existing Zendesk investors Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Matrix Partners also joined in.

This round marks the startup’s fourth round of institutional funding and brings its total VC money raised to date to a healthy $85.5 million.

Zendesk was founded in 2007; its staff of 250 is headquartered in the heart of San Francisco.

Today, we offer you a happy story about getting your funds locked down in PayPal. No, seriously.

According to All Things D, David Marcus, PayPal’s new president, is stepping in where his customers service fails. He sent out a personal e-mail to Build Conference creator Andy McMillan after the distraught PayPal user nearly lost $62,000 when two of his accounts were locked down. After many attempts to get on the phone with customer service, he finally consulted the Twitterverse and received a call from PayPal the next day, informing him that his funds went bye-bye and he wouldn’t get access to his account.

That’s a pretty big bummer when there are tens of thousands of dollars involved.

Marcus then stepped in with this letter:

Andy — the team will reach out between now and Monday, and they will lift all holds/limitations, and release all of your funds. If anything, please know that I’m not going to use your story to radically change how we deal with holds, and communicate with our customers. I’m driving a lot of changes at PayPal (I took over 5 months ago), and I hope that over time we will earn your turst again. Not with words, but with delightful products, and amazing service.

If you believe in this, I’d like to enroll you to help me out. I’d like you to keep accepting PayPal for payments, and now that you have a direct channel with me, give me feedback so I can get it directly from the outside. If you accept to do this (I would completely understand if by now you wouldn’t want to deal with PayPal ever again), you have my commitment that I’ll look after you account personally, and ensure this will never happen to you again. Again — would completely understand if you didn’t want to do this. I’m just trying to leverage the issues you went through to radically change our approach, and fix this for all of our customers for good.

Please confirm when you have access to your funds again so I know you’re good on that front. And again, don’t hesitate to contact me anytime. You now have my mobile number.

Have a great weekend.

David.

Sent from my iPad

I had to include that last part.

PayPal tapped Marcus to become president in March. He was previously the vice president of mobile, who released PayPal’s “Here” product, a competitor to Square. At the launch he told VentureBeat that PayPal is looking to change a lot of things, including the fact that design isn’t associated with the name PayPal.

“When you think about PayPal two years ago, the first thing you think about is not design. We want to change that,” he told VentureBeat at the time. “We want to go down to the last little pixel and make sure the UI is perfect.”

Even if this was a PR stunt — which it may not have been — Marcus obviously wants “good customer service” to be associated with his company. What president wouldn’t?

via All Things D; hat tip The Next Web; David Marcus image via Robert Scoble/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’ve got customers, then you’ve got mobile customers, and Zendesk wants you to take good care of them wherever they are, even if they’re on the go. To that end, the company pushed its cloud-based customer service software into the mobile world today.

“Customers can use their phone to go onto Twitter or Facebook to complain about the service they’ve received, but not necessarily to get the help they immediately need,” said Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane in a statement on the news.

“Our new mobile customer portal resolves this dilemma by offering a smooth, user-friendly, and effective self-service customer experience. With the new mobile customer portal, we have empowered the more than 20,000 businesses that use Zendesk to engage their more than 100 million customers in a way that fits the lifestyle of consumers today.”

Indeed, mobile is a huge part of how consumers are interacting with businesses these days. In a recent survey, pollsters found that more and more consumers fully expect the businesses they frequent to have mobile presences. And for younger consumers, not having a mobile channel strikes them as a sign of disrespect for the company’s clientele.

Zendesk’s new offering supports all the major platforms, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone; consumers can sign into the app using their Facebook or Google accounts. Zendesk expects that many consumer questions can be answered from within the mobile app (i.e., without requiring direct intervention from a customer service rep), and users can interact with each other to confer on issues and share tips.

The white-label software can be customized and branded for your own company, as well.

Here are some screenshots of the app hard at work:

Zendesk was founded in 2007 and is based in San Francisco. To date, the company has taken $25.5 million in one seed and three institutional rounds of funding, which saw participation from Charles Run Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Matrix Partners.

Top imag couresy of Arena Creative, Shutterstock

NoWait has raised over $2 million to save diners the inconvenience of waiting at restaurants.

Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line. Waiting for an extended period of time, researchers found, can causes stress, boredom, frustration, and dissatisfaction.

Seating people in a timely, organized manner is thus an important component of a diner’s overall experience. NoWait strives to add an additional layer of customer service by making inevitable wait times more organized, transparent, and manageable.

Restaurants can use this iPad app to keep track of available tables and alert customers with a text message when their table is ready. Rather than hovering like a vulture around that large group lingering over dessert, wielding a UFO-like buzzer, or worrying that you’ll lose your spot while you drink to kill the time at the bar next door, NoWait provides a more convenient alternative for hosts and patrons alike.

It creates wait lists and stores them online, including information about the parties, wait times, and status updates. Customers can be notified with one-touch when they are ready to be seated, as well as check their position on the list. They can also respond to the message to confirm their place.

The iOS app syncs multiple devices around a restaurant, so all data is updated in real time. NoWait will also deliver an analytics report that reviews the number of people on the wait list, walk-outs, and actual vs. quoted wait times, so restaurants can keep tabs on their efficiency.

The company currently has clients in 45 states and is signing hundreds of new locations every month. In the past year, over 4 million customers have been seated. It takes the convenience of OpenTable and applies it to casual dining. It is a useful solution for restaurants that do not take reservations, as well as for customers who do not book tables in advance.

This investment came from Birchmere Ventures, Sand Hill Angels, and Innovation Works (IW). The app was built with seed funding from IW’s AlphaLab Tech Accelerator and Carnegie Mellon University Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund. NoWait is based in Pittsburgh.

If you forget your Apple iCloud password, don’t expect to hop on the phone to change it. Apple announced today that for the time being, it will no longer change passwords over the phone, according to The New York Times.

The move comes after a hacker tricked an Apple customer service representative into handing a hacker the keys to Wired reporter Mat Honan’s digital kingdom.

Over the weekend, the hacker, aka Phobia, gamed Amazon customer service, who gave him access to Honan’s account. The information Phobia found there provided him enough information to trick Apple and get into Honan’s iCloud account. From there, Phobia deleted Honan’s Gmail account, wiped his iPhone, iPad, Mac, and spammed his and Gizmodo’s Twitter accounts (Honan had linked the two accounts previously).

Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris said this in a statement:

“We’ve temporarily suspended the capability to reset AppleID passwords over the phone. We’re asking customers who need to reset their password to continue to use our online iForgot system (iforgot.apple.com). This system can reset a password in one of two ways – either have a password reset sent to an alternate e-mail address already on record or challenge the customer to answer security questions they had previously set up. When we resume over the phone password resets, customers will be required to provide even stronger identify verification to reset their password.”

At the time, all you needed to retrieve an Apple password was the person’s e-mail address, billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. These pieces of information are easily uncovered with a little digging. Phobia snagged the last four digits of Honan’s credit card after breaking into his Amazon account, which was fairly easy as well.

Phobia accessed Honan’s Amazon account by providing an account holder’s name, e-mail address, and billing address (that last of which Phobia found after doing a “WhoIs” lookup on one of Honan’s websites) to a customer service representative. Once approved, Phobia added a new credit card number to the account, which was later used as “identifying information” to trick a second Amazon representative into letting Phobia into the account. The four-digit credit card number used to trick Apple was listed inside the account.

Yesterday, Amazon quietly told customer service that it was no longer allowed to change account information, such as adding a credit card number or e-mail address, over the phone.

via The New York Times; Image via gflinch/Flickr

Last week, British Airways announced that it would be Googling passenger images to train its flight crews to recognize important people who may not be instantly recognizable. The program is called “Know Me.”

“The most recent advancement of the system enables the British Airways team to search Google images for a photo of specific customers so they can recognise them and proactively approach them. The airline is aiming to send 4,500 personal recognition messages a day by the end of the year,” an airline spokesman told the London Evening Standard.

As someone who travels a lot, I recognize the importance of personalized service. I appreciate it when I get the right type of car, hotel room with a view, or a last-minute operational upgrade. But this just seems creepy and over the line.

Virgin America, which is a leader in using social media to respond to customers, doesn’t do this level of searching.

“Our frontline teammates refrain from use of social media when interacting with guests and/or during work hours,” said spokeswoman Abby Lunardini. “Additionally, working flight crew cannot use personal electronic devices during the course of normal duty.”

Although I live my life fairly publicly and don’t expect privacy on things that I openly share on Twitter, if a flight attendant suddenly started talking to me about something I’d written about, I’d be more than a little creeped out.

It’s entirely different when the customer initiates the interaction. When I request things from Virgin America on Twitter, I never have to provide my frequent flier number or confirmation number. That’s incredibly convenient. Because I can’t secretly test airlines, I asked Lunardini if my treatment was unique.

“Our social media team is generally aware of top frequent flyers and we tend to have more interaction with them overall,” Lunardini said. “We do try to offer consistent social media guest care for all users (not that you aren’t special!), but we certainly do look at flight history, Elevate accounts, and other details when we can and as needed in responding.”

There’s a dance that is going to evolve over time, and the reactions are going to be different from person to person. Should a customer’s Twitter handle be associated with their account? Should a customer service rep automatically see all tweets about the company from this person? Should they see all tweets, even those that don’t relate to the business?

People who are designing customer relationship management systems need to think about what’s socially acceptable in addition to what’s technically possible.

Consider this note I received when I checked in at the W Boston Hotel. While reading it, see if you can figure out what they shouldn’t have included:

It was nice that they acknowledged my loyalty to Starwood. But the 161 stays is an unnecessary detail. They could have just said thank you for your loyalty over the years. Even though we all subconsciously know that our actions are being tracked, this jumps out and underscores the point. There’s really no reason to expose this level of detail to front-line personnel at each hotel.

On the other hand, there are many cases where businesses could provide better service by integrating technology but don’t.

We’re all familiar with the IVR systems at banks and credit card companies that ask you for you account information, have you authenticate, etc. And then when you finally get to an agent, the first thing they ask you is for your account number. None of the work that you did with the automated system carries over.

Interactions in other channels should carry over.

My pet peeve is American Express’s customer service system. (Disclosure: I own AXP stock.) I manage my account entirely online. I check my balances, view my transactions, and pay my bill on their website or mobile apps. I will never, ever call them for something that is automated because it’s faster to do it myself online. My account should be coded so that on the off chance I do call, I skip the IVR system and go straight to an agent.

As startups move into more service intensive businesses, paying attention to the details of customer interaction will be important.

GrubHub, which allows customers to order restaurant meals for delivery or pickup online, has a great system. If you call from a phone number that is associated with your account, your order details immediately pop up on the screen of the customer service representative.

“In my experience it has helped us resolve diner inquiries faster, making for a happier diner,” said GrubHub spokeswoman Abby Hunt. “When someone is hungry, being fast is important.”

[Top image credit:  Lane V. Erickson/Shutterstock]

Drawbridge grabs cash for better social ads

Drawbridge announced a $6.5 million investment today. The company wants to make mobile ads as sophisticated and targeted as their desktop counterparts. Prominent firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital led the round.

Mixpanel’s unique analytics attract a new investment

Y Combinator startup Mixpanel just raised its first institutional round of funding. The company dives deep into pageview and visitor engagement analytics, offering real-time “micro” stats. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and additional angel investors, including PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Yammer chief executive David Sacks, participated.

Coupa gets money for its expense reports

Mere months after closing a $12 million investment, Coupa has closed its fifth round of funding for $22 million. The company did not disclose its valuation. The company’s software can track any payroll-related spending and procurement. It handles invoicing, inventory, budgets, and expense reporting. New investor Crosslink Capital led the round. Existing investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures participated.

Moviepilot.com gets funding for fanboys

Movie site for fanboys, Moviepilot.com raised $7 million in second-round funding. The company scours the Internet for movie news and helps movie studios promote their latest flicks. DFJ Esprit led the round.

Google Apps security company BetterCloud raises its seed round

BetterCloud announced it has closed a $2.2 million investment. It offers cloud management services aimed at Google Apps, such as security and group management. The seed funding comes from angel investors and chief executive David Politis.

This CRM raised $6.8M

Future Simple, the company behind Base, has raised $6.8 million. Base operates similarly to Salesforce by storing business contacts and leads. Index Ventures led the round, with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating.

Drumbi grabs funding for a customer service automated system (exclusive)

Hate those machines you get when you call a customer service line? Drumbi is creating one of those, but it claims it will do a much better job. It also promises to cut down on those excruciating wait times. The company raised $2 million at a $8.5 million pre-money valuation from Quest Software.

Turning webcams into credit card scanners, Jumio nabs funding

Online payment and ID company Jumio has raised funding. The company did not officially disclose the funding amount, but it’s said to be $3.3 million from Citigroup, according to VentureWire. Jumio turns web and smartphone cameras into credit card and ID card processing machines.

Another credit card processing startup, Flint Mobile

Like Square, Intuit, and Pay Pal before it, Flint Mobile raised $3 million to process credit cards with your phone. Flint Mobile is shunning a square, triangle, or moon-shaped dongle in favor of using a smartphone camera to process payments. It will make money by way of transaction fees; 1.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for debit cards and 2.95 percent plus $0.20 per transaction for credit cards. Storm Ventures led the round.

Bloc is going to make a web developer out of you

Web coding online school Bloc has raised $250,000 in seed money to transform you into a web developer in eight weeks. For three grand, you’ll be able to write Ruby on Rails code with the best of ‘em. In time the company will also offer iOS develop classes and HTML/CSS design programs. Robert Hutter at Learn Capital led the seed round, in the form of a convertible note.

One million dollars goes towards 3-D fashion games for women

Frenzoo raised $1 million today to create 3-D fashion iOS and Android games for women. It’s first game, Me Girl, features 3-D-like avatars that girls can dress up and play with as supermodels. Efficient Corporate, Siemer Ventures, K5 Ventures, and Metaverse Services participated in the round.

Hey, you’ve got a loyalty program in my point of sale system

Mobile loyalty program startup RewardLoop has raised $1 million in funding. The company’s system connects to point of sale devices to offer loyalty programs and printed receipt offers. Madrona Ventures led the first round of funding for RewardLoop.

Money exploding from computer image via Shutterstock 

At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our “Funding daily” column.

Freshdesk raises $5M

Online customer support software provider Freshdesk grabbed a $5 million in funding, the company reported Thursday. Freshdesk uses social media to connect with customers that need assistance. The new funding, led by Tiger Global with Accel Partners participating, will be used to build the engineering team and add new product features.

Ahalife nabs funding for unique, luxury online shopping

Online shop for curated one-of-a-kind, luxury wares Ahalife has raised $10.1 million in a second round of funding. The site sells luxury products, such as clothing, jewelry, and electronics, picked by experts and celebrities. Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten led the round, with participation from existing investors DCM and FirstMark Capital. The company has raised a total of $19.1 million.

MetaMarkets gets big money for big data

Big data analytics company MetaMarkets has raised $15 million in a new funding round, the company announced today. The company offers big data analytics for social and e-commerce companies that need to crunch a lot of numbers. Its data science-as-a-service helps analytics teams notice trends and forecast how future events will affect their data. Khosla Ventures led the round, and existing investors IA Ventures and True Ventures also participated.

Hulu co-owner Providence Equity sells its stake for $200M

Providence Equity Partners has sold its 10 percent stake in Hulu for $200 million. The investment firm is the only one of Hulu’s four owners that isn’t a media company. Providence’s initial investment in Hulu was $100 million back in 2007, meaning the firm received a nice ROI. Some have estimated that Hulu’s total worth is in the range of $2 to $4 billion.

SendHub raises $2M for group text messaging

SendHub snagged a $2 million investment to deliver SMS to businesses and organizations. The Y Combinator graduate developed a service that schools, coaches, community leaders, and others can use to communicate with a large group. Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage fund, 500 Startups, Bronze Investments, Menlo Ventures, and angels including Eric Ries, Paul Buchheit, and Jawed Karim all participated in the round.

TAPTAP Networks secures $4.5 million

Spanish mobile ad network TAPTAP Network has raised $4.5 million in funding. The company puts together mobile video ads for companies and manages ad campaigns. Nauta Capital led the round.

Freshdesk gets that you’d rather be liking your friend’s drunk vacation photos on Facebook than sitting on the phone with customer service because your computer won’t hold a charge. That’s why the company uses Facebook and Twitter for customer service purposes, along with email and phone call support. It provides help desk and ticketing services that can be used with just an email content — no need to log into the service directly.

The company competes directly with ZenDesk, a similar help desk and ticketing service. ZenDesk also uses Facebook and Twitter to process customer service issues and requests.

The new funding, led by Tiger Global with Accel Partners participating, will be used to build the engineering team and add new product features.

Freshdesk has offices in Los Angeles and India. The company launched in July 2011.

Angry customer service call image via Shutterstock

Photo via William Hook/Flickr

Through Tello’s app, customers can direct feedback straight to a vendor — feedback about the business as a whole, an individual employee, or a specific experience, whether good or bad — to help vendors refine problem areas and ultimately increase sales.  The system promises to be more effective and open to possibilities than surveys.  For example, if a disgruntled patron walks out of their neighborhood shop, they can log in to Tello and provide feedback immediately.

Currently, the masses flock to Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter to voice negative experiences and demand reimbursement.  Tello says it expands on that trend by enabling users to request a response from managers.  Tello’s aim is to connect both parties instantly and give business owners a real-time look into employee ratings, metrics, and more.

“As every savvy businessperson knows, the key to building a sustainable company is repeat business and loyal customers.  A focus on listening to your customers and adapting your business goes a long way to achieving just that,” said chief executive officer Joe Beninato in a statement. “Tello for business gives companies both big and small a scalable platform to monitor customer feedback and resolve service issues that can have a direct effect on sales.”

Tello first debuted its app at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2011.  It evolved over the last year and now equips customers to interact via text messages and a thumbs up/down system.

Beninato launched this Palo Alto-based startup in February 2011.  Before Tello, Beninato started Presto, a venture-backed firm in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard.

This is Tello’s first round of funding, led by True Ventures, Bullpen Capital, and SV Angel.  Other investors include 500 Startups, Felicis Ventures*, Forerunner Ventures, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital, Mark Goines, Naval Ravikant, Russ Siegelman, Shervin Pishevar, Tim Donmoyer, and Transmedia Capital.

* Disclosure: Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures is an investor in VentureBeat.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

America’s most unpopular cell phone company has hit a new low. AT&T Wireless was rated last in customer experience by subscribers of Consumer Reports for the second year in a row.

And people don’t like AT&T on Facebook very much, either.

Consumer Reports surveyed  66,000 magazine subscribers who responded with their experiences using contract and non-contract wireless service. Twenty two carriers were  evaluated overall, but only four provide service nationwide: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

“We’ll of course evaluate and learn from the Consumer Reports survey,” a representative for AT&T told VentureBeat. The representative also pointed out a number of improvements that AT&T has made to its network over the past year, investing billions of dollars on capital projects.

The representative also touted the future benefits of the company’s hoped-for merger with T-Mobile, which enjoys a slightly better customer rating.

“As customer demand continues to skyrocket, our proposed T-Mobile merger will enable AT&T to improve our customers’ experience even more,” the representative said.

AT&T bid $39 billion to takeover T-Mobile, but the deal has since run into regulatory difficulties, and may not happen.

Mobile carrier Verizon came out on top in survey responses, with Sprint following at a close second. T-Mobile was rated third. Verizon was also the top-rated national carrier in 2010 according to Consumer Reports subscribers.

A non-scientific examination of Facebook “hate” pages ranks national wireless carriers in almost the same order as the Consumer Reports Survey.  The page for the group I Hate AT&T has 5,382 likes, while I Hate Verizon has only 404 likes. So while AT&T is America’s second largest mobile phone carrier with 100.7 million subscribers, it is 13 times more unpopular than Verizon, which has 107.7 million subscribers.

Sprint Wireless is the third largest American mobile carrier with 54.3 million subscribers. While Consumer Reports readers preferred Sprint to T-Mobile in terms of customer satisfaction, the Facebook audience does not.  I Hate Sprint has 1,234 unsatisfied subscribers on its Facebook page. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has a measly 33.73 million subscribers, and is the only one not to support the iPhone. But T-Mobile haters have liked the page I Hate T-Mobile 746 times, almost twice as much as Verizon haters.

Industry watchers have long blamed the iPhone for AT&T’s customer complaints.  AT&T was the first wireless carrier to begin offering the iPhone when it was first launched, and has since suffered under heavy data usage. However, Verizon has been offering the iPhone since late January of 2011, and has been able to maintain its customer satisfaction.

It’s worth noting that the proportion of Facebook haters to wireless subscribers is miniscule. However the ratio of haters to subscribers from one carrier to another is very revealing, and is a good gauge of customer satisfaction. The anti-AT&T page has 1 member for every 18,710 mobile subscribers.  Verizon has 1 hater for every 264,851 subscribers. The ratio of AT&T haters to customers is still more than double that of Sprint, which has 44,003 customers for every member of I Hate Sprint on Facebook.

Clearly AT&T’s troubles are not all the iPhone’s fault.

Images via I Hate AT&T, NontrivialMatt/Flickr

But lately, Twitter has been full of gripes about the once highly touted airline:

Used to love @virginamerica but they’ve become undependable and horrible at communicating with passengers. I’ll take on-time over hip.

@VirginAmerica Why would you go live with an online reservation system that doesn’t work? yfrog.com/h45hgzknj

So what happened?

The airline recently switched over to a new reservation system from Sabre, the industry-standard travel reservations network that started in the 1960s. The transition has caused significant issues with the airline’s Web site. Some passengers are having issues changing and canceling flights, making seat selections and viewing their frequent flier accounts. Airport check-in kiosks are also having issues. This has also led to dramatically increased call hold times.

Veteran blogger Anil Dash tweeted, “I’ve been fascinated by the botched Sabre migration. Worst since Hershey’s moved to SAP & had no candy for Halloween” in 2002.

Virgin spokeswoman Abby Lunardini said, “It’s a once in a lifetime cutover for an airline. If you look at the past history of cutovers [to new reservations systems], they never are easy for airlines. Every airline has tended to see issues for weeks, if not months afterward.” She said that airport operations have gone smoothly relative to other cutovers, but the Web side has experienced more issues than they anticipated.

The change was necessary because the rapid growth of the airline.

A reservation system change is one of the more complex technology challenges because airlines are 24×7 operations. “It’s a knife-edge cutover because you have live operations,” Lunardini said. “You have to move everything over to the new system at once.” She said the airline initially increased its call center staff by 30 percent (and later another 45 percent) and thinned its flight schedule in preparation for the switch.

The timing of the upgrade, right before the start of the holiday season, raised some questions on Twitter. Lunardini said Sabre provided two options for the switch: October, 2011 or June, 2012.

“We really felt it was a priority from a Web stability viewpoint but also from the business viewpoint to not wait until June of 2012 to make the switch, which would also be in the middle of the summer travel season,” Lunardini said.

The airline added extra airport staff over the busy Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and Lunardini said that the Thanksgiving weekend wasn’t actually that bad, given the holiday, with a high proportion of flights on time.

Passengers who booked their travel before October 27 are more likely to experience issues than passengers who made their travel plans after the switch to Sabre. For passengers whose travel isn’t imminent, Lunardini suggests trying their request at a later time if it doesn’t work initially. She said that many changes can be made at the airport. The airline is waiving change and cancellation fees for passengers who experience trouble.

Members of the airline’s frequent flier program who traveled during the period received an email apology from the airline’s CEO and 5,000 bonus points, worth the equivalent of a free short-haul flight.

Because consumers have been using social media to complain about the airline, Virgin America has also been using those channels to respond. Virgin has staffed its social media team around the clock.

“We are really the first airline that has gone through this type of business change in the era of social media,” Lunardini said.

The asynchronous nature of social media is also helpful because people don’t have to wait on hold before getting a response. She estimated that the airline has sent about 10,000 Twitter direct messages to travelers since the cutover.

Lunardini said that a major deployment that went in on Friday should fix many of the issues that customers are experiencing. She hopes that any remaining issues will be fixed with another deployment schedules for Dec. 8.

Once the bugs are worked out, the Sabre system will allow Virgin to offer new capabilities such as codesharing with V Australia and Virgin Atlantic, an elite program for very frequent fliers and mobile tools.

“We are hoping that when we get on the other side of these last errors that guests will still enjoy the experience with us and stay with us,” Lunardini said.

In the meantime, frustrated passengers continue to use social media to vent. To its credit, Virgin America is leaving negative comments up on its Facebook page, where it could easily remove them.

“Arrrgffhggh. – based in silicon valley – high tech airline that can not get it’s website working for weeks – wrong. Hold time on phone over 47 minutes !!,” wrote commenter Winston Vaughan.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

Top photo credit: Artur Bergman/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Oracle plans to acquire cloud-based sales force automation and customer service company RightNow for $1.5 billion, the company announced Monday morning.

The planned acquisition makes a ton a sense in light of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s announcement earlier this month to finally push Oracle into public cloud computing after many years of shunning cloud services. The Oracle Public Cloud will let its customers use Oracle apps direct from the Web or deploy native apps in the cloud.

The acquisition of RightNow will help Oracle continue branching out in the cloud in a different fashion. RightNow’s focus is on helping clients with customer engagement and problem solving through social media, rich online interfaces and contact centers. With those services in tow, Oracle will be able to better compete with the likes of Salesforce.com, which Ellison has been critical of.

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

Oracle’s offer of $1.5 billion equals $43 per share, a nearly 20 percent premium over RightNow’s closing price of $32.96 on Friday. Bozeman, Mont.-based RightNow said it has 2,000 customers and is currently listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange alongside Oracle.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place November 30 – December 1 in Redwood City, CA. Unlike other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies to dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Using a customer-centric approach, these case studies will highlight the core components of the cloud revolution: security, collaboration, analytics, mobile usage, increased productivity, and integration. Join over 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register now and save 25%.

Rob Tarkoff (pictured right) will replace founder Lyle Fong (pictured below) as CEO of Emeryville, Calif.-based Lithium. Fong will become the chief strategist and remain on the board. The change is effective Sept. 2.

The new addition will help the company figure out how to further marshal the power of company customers so they become passionate advocates who save a company money rather than whiny complainers who cost the company money. As Lithium puts it, they turn a customers’ passion into a company’s assets for marketing, product development, sales and customer service.

“We think of this category as social business,” said Fong in an interview. “And Lithium has been on a tear. We have grown well. We have bigger customers. It is no longer an experiment.”

Lithium has an interesting business where it enables companies to engage with their users by building out a community fan base for the companies. For example, Lithium can enlist customers of Best Buy and organize them into teams of community volunteers. Those volunteers can answer questions for other fans in exchange for achievements and community recognition. The more questions you answer from neophyte customers, the more achievements that you get as a community expert. Meanwhile, the company’s customer service costs drop because the community representatives answer more questions for the customers. It’s a kind of gamification (the use of game-like features in non-game applications), where users are rewarded with game-like prizes in exchange for their efforts.

Lithium goes into big companies and sets up their customer service organizations and web presence so that customers can get answers and advice about a company’s products quickly and easily. They don’t have to make an expensive call to customer support; they just look it up on the web or get an answer from a community expert. Beyond that, Lithium has expanded into new ways of helping companies engage with their customers in social ways, Fong said. In May, 2010, Lithium bought social monitoring startup Scout Labs.

“We are building more strategic relationships with companies,” said Fong, who was once a professional gamer and whose brother, Dennis Fong, is CEO of gamer social network Raptr.

Tarkoff was senior vice president and general manager of the digital enterprise solutions group at Adobe. That business has annual revenue in excess of $1 billion. In an interview, Fong said that he and his board wanted to find someone who could take the company to the next level of growth. They felt that Tarkoff fit the bill, since he pioneered Adobe’s customer experience management strategy and was responsible for core offerings at Adobe such as Acrobat, Adobe Connect Web conferencing and other businesses. He oversaw Adobe’s acquisition of Day Software, which brought social customer relations to Adobe. Previously, Tarkoff held executive positions at EMC, Documentum, and Commerce One.

In an interview, Tarkoff said, “We’ve seen the power of external social platforms and what it can do for businesses. That has fueled Lithium’s growth, but it’s a market that is in its early stages. Lyle has evangelized this category. Now companies are making investments in managing social communities.”

Fong said that Lithium has seen big growth in 2011, with a 100 percent increase in its community deployments. The company’s communities include more than 20 million registered users for brands such as The Home Depot, Sephora, Best Buy and Verizon. Lithium has more than 180 employees and was founded in 2001 under the name Gamers.com.

Lithium has raised three rounds of funding with a total take of $48.25 million. Investors include Tenaya Capital, Dag Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Emergence Capital Partners and Shasta Ventures. Rivals include Salesforce.com, Jive, and Cisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Assistly is shaking up its business model to become affordable for smaller and mid-sized businesses.

Assistly’s application gives businesses ways to interact with customers via various social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as email, all through a single window. Like the customer service product it is, Assistly listened to its own reviews and found smaller and mid-sized businesses could not afford the product.

Enter new business model, Assistly 2.0.

Co-founder and chief executive Alex Bard told VentureBeat the company now offers the account with Assistly free. Assistly wants smaller and mid-sized businesses to try out the company’s software and find out if it needs to expand.

“We want to grow with our customers,” Bard said. He said he hopes customers will identify their business needs and be willing to pay for more accounts.

Small and mid-sized businesses are deterred from buying because CRM pricing levels are difficult to grasp, Bard said. Companies don’t understand what features are worth paying for or what they will utilize, he said. That’s why Assistly has taken the freemium route — a model that gives customers a taste of a service and then charges for premium services later. Their new pricing model looks like this:

The “flex agent” is an employee who only uses the CRM software on the occasion. A developer may be called into customer service action at the launch of a new product. That developer can spend 25 hours assisting customers that week and only pay $25 for his usage. All full-time users after the initial agent pay $49 a month — which includes unlimited usage for the CRM software.

The company is going the popular “gamification” route to get users to try out features in the service. Setting up new features within the app gives customers rewards such as hours of free usage. For example, if a company connects its Twitter account to Assistly, it earns 3 free hours. The company is gamifying customer feedback in Assistly 2.0. Similar prizes are awarded when companies receive good feedback..

Assistly’s competitors are other social-based customer relationship apps like Zendesk, Parature, RightNow. The company also competes with CRM supergiant Salesforce, who is an investor in the company.

A competitor that is also an investor? Yup.

“We target 1-800 employee companies,” he said. “Their sweet spot is medium and large enterprises.”

Though they occasionally cross paths, Salesforce generally acts as more of a strategic investment. Assistly works with Salesforce to cover the a company’s overall CRM needs.

When asked if they would welcome an offer from Salesforce to buy the company, Bard said he wanted to create a large, standalone business. As far as the future it concerned, Assistly is developing iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Bard expects the mobile apps will go live at the end of Q3.

The company currently serves clients like Instagram, Klout, Vimeo, Yelp, Etsy, Spotify, Pandora, Square and more. San Francisco, Calif.-based Assistly was founded in 2009 and currently has 35 employees. Investors include True Ventures, Social Leverage, Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce.com and Kenny Van Zant.

Naturally, UserVoice said both moves were responses to its own user feedback. Last year, those customers said UserVoice FeedBack would be even better if combined with customer service tools. So with Full Service, the company bundled the existing Feedback tool with a new service called HelpDesk. The big goal was “to create a simple tool that gave support professionals the functionality they needed to give great customer service without all the extra bells and whistles,” UserVoice said.

Not only does HelpDesk allow companies a way to answer customer questions and complaints, but it also offers an Instant Answers system allowing customers to automatically see other relevant answers as they wrote out their question. And it includes a gaming system of sorts, where customer support providers can earn points by answering lots of questions quickly, and earn even more points by winning “kudos”, which are special thank yous from customers who were satisfied with the service.

UserVoice said HelpDesk is enough of a hit that some companies don’t want to bother with the user feedback part at all and just want to use it as a customer service tool. So starting today, UserVoice is making HelpDesk available on its own, with pricing beginning at $5 a month.

Since the Full Service launch, more than 1,000 businesses have signed up (UserVoice Feedback is used by 55,000 companies overall), and they’ve served 60,000 customers who have delivered kudos to 50 percent of those businesses.

A company spokesperson told me, “Yes, Feedback and HelpDesk are natural complements to each other, but not everyone is ready to take that next step (collecting feedback in addition to delivering support). Every company agrees that they need to offer some sort of customer support. We wanted to give them a superior experience with HelpDesk and, in time, convince them to collect feedback from their customers as well — a change from within, if you will.”

UserVoice has raised $800,000 in funding from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, Accelerator Group, and others.

[image via Flickr/lamont_cranston]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new mobile application called Tello offers you a chance to weigh in on the good and bad experiences you have at a restaurant, retail store, or anywhere else.

Think of it as a chance to speak to the manager without actually having to speak to the manager. I’ve certainly had customer service moments when I really wanted to complain about how badly I’d been treated or praise someone who’d done an amazingly good job (okay, more the former), but trying to find the manager seemed like too much trouble.

Tello makes it easier. You just open up the app (which is available for the iPhone and iPad as a downloadable application, and for Android and other phones as a mobile website), select the location, then give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. If you want to put a bit more work into it, you can also identify the employee you worked with and write a little review.

It’s like Yelp, but all about customer experience. If you were reviewing a restaurant on Yelp, you’d probably spend most of the time talking about food. If you’re reviewing it on Tello you focus on how you were treated. The goal is to help users figure out where they’ll be treated well and where they’ll be treated treated badly, and also tell them about who to seek out or avoid at a specific business. (Honestly is another people-review site, but it’s more about reviewing colleagues.)

The Palo Alto, Calif. startup launched a beta test version of its app at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September. But founder and chief executive Joe Beninato said that Tello has rebuilt the app for its full launch, adding features like the ability to share reviews on Facebook or Twitter, and to request a response from the business being reviewed. The new app looks and works better, he added, because it was taken off the cross-device PhoneGap platform and rebuilt specifically for iOS devices.

Another company called Gripe launched at the same conference, offering a slightly more attention-grabbing spin on a similar idea — users can take advantage of their social network connections to pressure businesses into treating them better. The Tello approach is less negative, Beninato said. In fact, 85 percent of the ratings were positive during the beta period.

Tello has raised $1 million in funding from Jon Callaghan of True Ventures, Ron Conway of SV Angel, Mark Goines, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Eric Paley of Founder Collective, Shervin Pishevar of SGN, Naval Ravikant of Venture Hacks, Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures (who also invested in VentureBeat), and Russ Siegelman. The company plans to make money by offering businesses extra data and features that will help them improve their customer service.

The company offers a web-based software service that helps monitor financial and operational data about IT and technical customer support. The service compiles all the data and gives companies a dashboard of tools for visualizing and analyzing that data.

The goal is to help business executives make better decisions about what to do with their IT operations — such as whether to introduce new software or add additional staff. Apptio’s Technology Business Management service also provides some cost modeling and a decision-making engine.

Apptio originally wanted to raise $16.5 million in its most recent round of funding — but that was before Cisco decided to participate. The company decided to raise the cap on its round of funding to allow for Cisco’s investment, since Cisco brings with it access to a wide network of enterprise clients, said Apptio founder and CEO Sunny Gupta. Apptio’s existing investors also participated.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company was founded in 2007 and has so far raised $41 million. It was also the first investment for investment guru Marc Andreessen’s new venture capital fund when it raised $14 million last year. It raised $7 million in its first round, bringing its total funding to date to $41 million.

The company has seen 400 to 500 percent growth every quarter when compared to the same quarter a year earlier, Gupta said. Its clients include Microsoft, Cisco and JP Morgan Chase. While Gupta was mum on Apptio’s yearly revenue, he said it was north of eight figures.

The most recent fundraising round was led by a number of heavy-hitters including Andreessen-Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon Wireless announced yesterday that it’s refunding $90 million to around 15 million customers who were mistakenly charged for data access on their phones over the past few years.

The majority of affected customers will see credits in the $2 to $6 range on their next bill. Former customers who have moved on to another carrier will receive checks.

The charges stemmed from customers who mistakenly accessed data sessions on their phones, even though they didn’t have data plans. As Verizon explains: “These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones. The majority of the data sessions involved minor data exchanges caused by software built into their phones; others involved accessing the Web, which should not have incurred charges. We have addressed these issues to avoid unintended data charges in the future.”

Many, including the New York Times’ David Pogue, complained about Verizon’s practice of charging small fees to access data services — particularly because it seemed like its phones were designed to encourage launching data apps by mistake.

According to a Pogue reader who worked for Verizon, the company was well aware of the issue, but allowed it to continue. “The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month!” he wrote. “That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake! Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue?”

Verizon at last seems to have grown a conscience — or maybe it realized that with its great Android superphone success, which demand heftier data plans, it no longer needs to nickel and dime its customers.

Users on Tello, Instead of writing a detailed review through a site like Yelp, simply give a thumbs up or a thumbs down based on the service delivered by a business or a specific employee. Users can also provide a brief description to explain their vote.

“Tello is more like [posting on Twitter], it takes thirty seconds or less,” said Joe Beninato, CEO and cofounder of Tello. “You can’t do an immediate rating on Yelp and it’s more like a multi-paragraph blogging platform.”

Users can also scout out the best employees to work with ahead of time to avoid a bad customer service experience. Tello provides customer reaction data to businesses in the hope that they will encourage employees to provide better service and reward employees that consistently get good reviews on Tello.

The app is available as either an iPhone app or an HTML5 app for mobile phones, but Tello plans to roll out a number of apps for the other marketplaces over the next couple of months, including the Android marketplace and others.

Tello was founded in February earlier this year and has raised $1 million in funding. The iPhone app is available on the app store now, and the website should be up and running in the next couple of hours, Beninato said.

Vonata is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Shervin Talieh wants to eliminate the call center. So the serial entrepreneur is taking another run at a tech startup with Vonata, a tool that promises to eliminate wait times to talk to a customer service representative, which he’s unveiling today at the DEMO conference.

Vonata routes consumer service requests to the customer service representatives appropriate for a customer’s needs. The customer can also specify a call time that works for their schedule.

The seven-person company, founded in 2010, is headed by Talieh. Its business model is to charge clients only when the service is used.

Vonata’s first customer will begin using the service in November. Talieh said the company is in negotiations with a large partner responsible for managing marketing campaigns for several Fortune 1000 companies.

Companies like Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Ribbit all offer elements of Vonata, but not the complete package, Talieh said.

Vonata has so far raised around $350,000 in two rounds from family and friends, the most recent of which was completed two months ago.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693