Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you find?

Joshua March: Many things. Like I said, we took this agile approach where we said, “What’s the simplest and fastest thing that we can do to start testing this out and start learning?” We sat down and built a Facebook page moderation tool. We had all these big brands and agencies who had these pages but were struggling to manage that. We can build a simple tool in a couple of months. We worked very quickly to do that. The result was awesome. There were a lot of brands who really loved it. So we kept building and developing.

Sramana Mitra: Did you give this product out for free?

Joshua March: Yes. We were just focused on learning at that time. We kept building more functionalities. We got to the stage where we had a product that we were happy with. We had a lot of people who loved the free version. We went out to see who’s going to pay for this. That was a really interesting experience. We went down a bit of a rabbit hole at one point when a major media company signed up very early on and started paying us very good money for it. I got really excited and we ran after all the big media companies in the UK. No one wanted it. This was now getting into early 2011.

We had a number of different customers. We had a product that was developing. We were still trying to figure out where to focus our efforts. Then this really awesome thing happened where one of the biggest retailers in the UK, Tesco, came to us and said, “We’re realizing that lots and lots of our customers go to our Facebook page when they have issues. We think the only way we can deal with this is to have a team in our contact center to respond to this.” We started working with them to provide the software to power this team. This was in early 2011. It was really exciting because we realized that consumers are increasingly turning to social. They had genuine questions and issues. These are the kinds of things that they would have otherwise, emailed about. They are now posting on Facebook.

I learned a lot about what’s needed to run a large technical service organization and all the unique requirements of managing this kind of operation, which was very specific around workflows, order management, and integration. I started doing a lot of thinking about this industry and this market. First of all, I really believed that this was going to be a major opportunity. As social became the primary communication channel, it was also going to become a major customer service channel. We were starting to see that in the early days. The only way that companies are going to be able to handle that is to move social media into the contact center and to have real customer service agents responding. It sounds obvious now but at that time, no one was doing it. I really believed that everyone would have to do that.

At the same time, no one in the market was catering to those requirements. Every other social tool out there was focused on selling to marketing teams, CMOs, or social media managers. It was a crowded market already. I also started doing a lot of analysis around the incumbent customer service centers. I used the model in the book Innovator’s Dilemma. The book essentially goes through different types of market innovations and technological innovations and has a theory on what kind of innovation will create new markets that will be add-ons to existing markets. I realized that this is the requirement of being a disruptive technology that the incumbent would then really struggle to compete with. I realized that those market dynamics were really true. All of those things combined made us conclude that we should focus all of our efforts on customer service and meeting their needs of large scale enterprise contact centers.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March
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