Mobile Customer Service Ratings and Big Data

I'm very excited to join the Tello team as cto and work with Joe Beninato on building the company. Tello is focused on providing consumer ratings to businesses through mobile devices input.

What is absolutely exciting here is the potential disruption on how businesses can listen and re-engage with their consumers thanks to that input data.

Any solution to solve the problems of letting businesses

•  know consumer feedback as early as possible, either in store for retail or wile being serviced (hotels, airlines..) 
•  understand what their consumers "think" by correlating it back to specific service attributes (employees, lighting, music in store, food...)

are essential for their well being. Performance metrics such as converting a visitor to a buyer inside a retail store or retaining existing customers/subscribers will improve over time thanks to a better understanding of the customer service function.

The quality of the solutions can now be made higher thanks to advances in mobile technology and a wider adoption of smartphones.

• It is easier to capture meaning "conversational like" review input from a phone, starting with simple SMS messages to lightweight mobile webapp to native apps with all services (location, identity profile integration, rewards/coupons, etc..).
• On the back end, the potential gold is in mining all of that input, mostly unstructured and giving "wow" insights back to the businesses. Wouldn't you like to know for instance as an exec at Best Buy that the current store music in San Jose is not liked by Gen X traffic between 4-6pm, then most of your traffic, and that a change in music style would convert that traffic better?

As far as consumers are concerned, with the proper incentives as well as low frictions data input mechanisms, they will naturally provide input to the businesses. In truth, even a small percentage of them contributing data is enough thanks to statistics accumulating over time which makes the data significant enough for meaningful/accurate action.



Please check out tello.com. We will also have a lot more product and partnership announcements over the next few months. Finally, we are hiring across all spectrums of engineering, from native app mobile developers to front end and back end developers on modern tech stacks to product designers (UI/UX). The company is well funded with supportive first class Silicon Valley investors.

Feel free to reach out to me at echeyde@tello.com for eng hiring info, and/or joe@tello.com the business side.


Best
Echeyde Cubillo

Singlefeed Learnings

Today was my last day at Singlefeed post acquisition. The systems are now in good technical shape and there is a capable team in place, including a brand new sales force team that is generating new growth.

I just wanted to share a few learning nuggets from Singlefeed which has turned out to be one of the most enlightening  startups I've been to.

• If you believe in what you do, keep at it and sort out the issues that get in your way: execution/financing/team, etc... perseverance goes a long way toward success.
• All key parts of the business have to be run by excellent people to avoid any disfunctionality: Great product development is not enough if the sales folks are not great, or if customer service is not impeccable.
• Invest in solidifying what turns out to be the core product features that your customers cannot live without. There is not much point in developing new features unless your "discovered core" is rock solid.
• Understand that customer service (CS) is the "voice of the customer" and needs real time reactions rather than mostly deal with CS through queuing in "ticketing systems".
• In enterprise facing businesses, integrate your application, and billing, to a crm package to get "insights" on basic customer activities on the product. You will end up supporting them better. 
• Finally, and this is applicate to most tech startups, unless you have torrid growth, get serious on cash flow habits early on and avoid premature scale out. Soon or later your venture money will dry and profitability is your next milestone with repeatable sales/eng processes, all of whom can take a while to discover and hone. At least you will have a shot at building a lasting company.

Singlefeed acquired by Vendio, an Alibaba.com company

This is a great fit for Vendio and Alibaba. It will also make Singlefeed one of those key back end services powering some of the biggest e-commerce players in the world. Singlefeed has been a great experience (not done yet) , especially around learning that it matters to become profitable early on, that the product did not require any outbound sales effort to be profitable (a.k.a low cost customer acquisition costs) and that customers truly cared for the product thanks to solid retention rate past the initial on-boarding phases. All of it is a testament to the quality team in place in sales, account management and engineering. I'm hoping , and working to help, that Singlefeed will continue to be a solid service used at large scale for tens of thousands of merchants. Special thanks to the original founder Brian Smith who really found the problem to solve and brought the business to financial health.

How integrating your paid cloud service to a CRM app will help you grow to profitability faster

If you have an application that is sold to businesses/consumers as a cloud service through subscriptions or "a la carte menu", you can gain a lot in terms of gathering intelligence around your customers and acting on it. This can be done with API integrations from your application events to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package.  This post is about giving some practical examples and how they could make your business more efficient by focusing on good product design, revenue and cost. Please note this is not about monitoring your application through web analytics solutions, such as Ommiture, Google Analytics etc, that focus on different customers aspects (web entry/exit points, session usage, demographics... rather than the "depth" of your customer paying relationships).

Nowadays the technology to get such critical understanding of your customer base is readily available, fairly cheap in development resources and licensing costs. That availability only became recent when CRM companies starting exposing their data customization through web APIS. The end result is that the smallest of start ups can use it to their advantage to become more efficient and compete with much larger players.

From a technology standpoint, I recommend to consider which application events should be registered into a CRM package during the design phase. Also, collect as much data as possible since in the future you might find ways to report on the data that would bring you valuable insights.

Nowadays, best of breed CRMs have APIs where you design an account object (your customer), and tie it back to the account object as defined in the CRM.  You would typically create an account object either during your registration flows or when they start paying you. You should notably take advantage of the ability to customize your account object by adding your application  custom fields, for instance account A  that you know is a "hospital type"  and is using a "free trial for feature A". Those custom fields will start to give you incredible data mining reports regarding segmenting your customer base by services (feature sets), who they are, etc.... Once your application events are registered at the account level, get to your billing system and again integrate what your customers pay you for the application usage. At this point, you can start understanding where your revenue is coming from in terms of features and from what type of customers.  

Now that you have a better handle on the revenue, you might want to look at the cost side in terms of how you interact with your customers. For instance, if you have cases where your customers need "touching", such as questions related to your products that are not answered from your help knowledge base or if a phone/IM chat interaction is needed, etc... then again there should be a way to integrate such actions into your CRMs.  Integration points typically can be found through APIs (browser or back end based) to register such data events.

Finally, you can create triggers based on your CRM data changes  that you can use to communicate with your customers. For instance, if a customer uses "feature A and B" and you have a discounted bundle price for "feature A,B,C" you could email them to upgrade to "C"  shortly after they register for feature A and B.

Over time, as your business grows, and you collect more info around your customers and how they relate to your cloud service, you will naturally become better at making the right decisions based on existing behaviors ( the good ones: revenue going up and the bad ones: features not wanted, cancellations you could prevent moving forward, etc...). Such tight integration from the early days of when customers (a.k.a entities paying you)  start using your service will put you on the right path of reaching profitability with clear decisions backed with the right data.

In terms of which CRM package to use, if you are starting from scratch, Salesforce.com has good APIs, recently moved over to REST, and client libraries in almost every language. Additionally, most vendors servicing all of the possible aspects of managing customer relations, such as"support" systems, "chat systems with customers", etc... have plug-ins. You will likely consider those vendors as you grow so you might as well make sure they integrate so you can tie them as well. Other good CRM packages exist as well and you might consider their ease of integration to your app when deciding which one to use.

Facebook's Revenue Growth is in front of it

After doing some research on Facebook, since we are evaluating a product integration, it's become pretty clear that their rise to dominating a bigger piece of the advertising market is in front of them. Since they have so much user data from logged in operations, unlike other search engines that have anonymous info for the most part, they will be able to target better than anybody else. This will become very evident once they start building more search capabilities, especially the ones that support buying intent, to generate highly paid ads on the merchants that want to showcase products on Facebook.com or on their own e-commerce store with social plug-ins and one would think Facebook served ads. At this point, Facebook should see tremendous revenue growth much like Google had earlier last decade. My predictions is that search + advertising (on/off Facebook) will take top priorities and fuel that company in 2011/2012 to seriously exponential revenue.  I also think they will build such capabilities rather fast internally and through acquisitions simply because startups building on top of the Open Graph can rapidly be absorbed without much product rebuild. The Open Graph APIs for acquirees would then be turned into internal ones that should expose more data to harden up any ad/reporting/analytics integration.

it's been almost a year at singlefeed now. Most of 2010 we worked on improving site uptime and redoing the tech stack to a newer one so we can focus for growth in 2011. The business also executed well on most fronts (customer service, sales, ops, eng) and is now profitable, cash flow is well managed and improved. We keep signing up new accounts and the average customer retention time keeps increasing. Soon we will launch new destination channels for customers which will help acquire a bigger customer base and improve average orders... Stay tuned...

After having checked out the Valley's start ups for 2 months, and a few bigger companies (albeit I re-realized how different they think with respect to smaller ones), I decided to help a small startup, called singlefeed, to run its eng efforts. It's not consumer this time around, and the business is almost profitable , a.k.a back to paying customers :)- . The space, multi-channel distributions from merchant's catalog feeds, is ripped for new opportunities thanks to new channels, such as social networks, and the opening up of new listing marketplaces. I'll keep you posted on the progress, but I'm quite hopeful that the current niche is about to open up further and sales will follow nicely. Oh and btw, we will soon be hiring engineers, so if anybody is interested , please ping me. We look for passion/drive and excellent coding skills .

Cheers

New venture to come!

Well blazingstreams.com has gotten some traffic lately (about 40K/month) but I am not pleased it's mostly from SEO and loyalty is not high when I believe reader loyalty is key in this space. It turns out I am in a crowded news aggregator space, monetization is not clear and the product still needs more work after all (in itself not an issue). Since I like ventures that work quickly, I decided to put blazingstreams on hold. I am therefore back onto figuring the next great venture to get into. If you have any ideas , please ping me :)- , I am pretty open to new industries. I'm now searching again, and if you know great entrepreneurial persons or companies, please feel free to put me in touch as well.

Cheers

http://www.blazingstreams.com/home.html is starting to become better now that the back end produces better and more abundant news results. Please check it out when you have a second, and feedback is always welcome.

We've made a lot of progress on the back end to improved the relevancy of search in surfacing news. Check out www.blazingstreams.com to get a preview. However the UI is not quite user friendly yet, so now is the time to start focusing on it. Feedback always welcome as we change the front end.
Best

hi, we are finally launching our Alpha release today to a limited list of reviewers who want to engae in providing feedback. If you are interested, please contact me at echeyde@yahoo.com.
Regards
Echeyde

Making good progress on the back end , the trickiest part. Hoping to have a web page up within weeks now and let people react to it. After that, I'll need to iterated and start ramping up the team since there will be a product to work from.

Met quite a few techies over the last 2 weeks and got interesting feedback, some of which I am planning to incorporate. I'm always looking for input, so keep bringing it on.

Cheers

Just filed the incorporation paperwork and bought a domain name under blazingstreams.com. This will reflect the concept of surfacing breaking news and distributing it anywhere. Now is time to focus on the product and seek for an early release by summer time. If anybody knows of a good iPhone developer, please let me know :)-.

Welcome to my Blog that I use to post ideas and can be used to receive feedback.
A little bit about myself, I am a software entrepreneur with a passion for consumer products. I worked at eBay for a while in the growth days when it seemed unstoppable. I then went on to start a person-to-person loan product. The idea had too much regulation involved and it looked like it was not ready for mainstream. So within the year my co-founder, Leonard Speiser, and I returned all money to investors. We then moved on to help co-found Bix, an online contest site led by Mike Speiser. This time, the product worked rather quickly. The team was great, and Yahoo bought us within the year. We then worked there for 2 years as part of our commitment and managed to push some good changes, like moving the Y! Groups codebase over to Java. Now I am moving on to start something else. I am currently thinking about how to use Twitter to change the way people consumer/discuss or even source news. I think Twitter is a disruptive innovation that will help reshape the way we communicate. I am glad they are thinking of themselves as an open platform from the get go so external people, like myself, can build applications on top of it.


On the personal side, I am from France , and became a US citizen recently making me a dual citizen, so nice.... In my spare time, I spend time with my sweetie Terry who lives with me , and I race my express 27 sailboat around the SF Bay area. It is a great fast boat designed in Santa Cruz, those guys are real good boat-builders. I'd like to ski more but it is hard to juggle multiple passions, maybe soon if I get better organized.

Welcome to my blog :)-, you can also follow me at http://twitter.com/echeyde .
Cheers