Startup to Manage Complaints - For Customers

Many businesses have contemplated outsourcing customer service in order to reduce costs and emotional strain on their own employees whose purpose, the theory is, can be more optimally focused on selling. The problem with that approach is that repeat customers are far more profitable so enterprises that do not treat customer service as a higher priority may end up costing themselves more in the long run.

It is a telling statement on the nature of the economy that a startup has now emerged to help consumers offload their customer service issues with merchants. The rise in digital commerce has created a growing need to manage returns and other dissatisfactions, especially given angry customers penchant for posting social media reviews about their experiences. This demand may decline as consumers and ecommerce merchants (and their algorithms) become more familiar with each other, but  having an intermediary to take the emotion out of the interaction may become a very popular solution to in order to make the process more professional - and possibly give the customer more leverage. JL

Malcolm Moore reports in the Financial Times:

“My goal is to go to these companies and say not only are we saving you money by having people not call your call-centre but we are saving your branding by preventing the angry twitter storm or the one-star TripAdvisor review.”
The customer service helpline is often thought to lie somewhere between Dante’s first circle of hell, Limbo, and his seventh, Violence.Now a Los Angeles start-up wants to spare people the emotional strain of waiting on hold by resolving their complaints for them.“The idea for the company was me wasting too much of my time dealing with customer service,” said Michael Schneider, the founder of Service.
“If you deal with it yourself, you feel you are losing your time. If you do not do anything you feel like you have been ripped off.”
Service, which has raised just shy of $4m in seed funding led by San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund, asks customers to fill in a form on its website or app. It then tries to negotiate a settlement with the poorly performing company.
“We are more efficient. Customers are often not the most articulate and can often be emotional. That makes the job more difficult at the other end. We are not emotional; we are matter-of-fact,” said Mr Schneider.
Service processes more than 100 requests a day and recovers just under $300 on average for customers. “The biggest area is travel, with the lion’s share being airline delays and cancellations and lost bags,” he said. “Travel makes up half our cases. Then there is retail: Amazon, Home Depot and Best Buy and telecoms companies, with queries over cable and mobile phone bills.”
In the UK, Service said it had dealt with complaints to easyJet, Motorola and Missguided, the online fashion retailer.
Mr Schneider said Service planned eventually to make money by charging either consumers or the offending companies. “My goal is to go to these companies and say not only are we saving you money by having people not call your call-centre but we are saving your branding by preventing the angry twitter storm or the one-star TripAdvisor review.”
A number of failed technology start-ups have in the past attempted to name and shame bad customer service by giving consumers a place to vent their rage online. In recent years, several companies have focused on using social media sites such as Twitter to respond to unhappy customers.

Service also has agreements with companies including taxi-hailing app Uber and online ticket sales company Ticketmaster that provide it with a direct line to resolve complaints.

The company currently only employs four staff but said it would take on another person during the holiday period. “Our eventual goal is to have the software do most of the work,” said Mr Schneider.
“Every time we solve a case, the software gets a bit smarter. The first time we called British Airways we had no idea what we were doing,” he said. “Now we have mapped most large companies so we know the quickest way to resolve problems. Some companies are easy, some are more difficult.”