OpenView Partners Adds Customer Service Expert Bill Price as Senior Advisor

Today, OpenView Venture Partners announced that Bill Price will join the firm as a Senior Advisor.

Bill will join the firm as a member of OpenView Labs, the strategic and operational consulting group for its portfolio companies. This essential addition will help propel OpenView’s capability for building and supporting customer service initiatives. The addition of Bill to the team directly aligns with OpenView’s promise to deliver meaningful impact to each and every portfolio company. Bill will primarily work as a consultant, coaching OpenView’s companies on best practices for customer service.

“We are excited to have Bill join the OpenView team. We initially engaged with Bill and his team in 2010 for our Customer Service Workshop and quickly realized the potential for great value for our portfolio companies. His experience and expertise will be a great asset to each and every company in our portfolio,” said Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director of OpenView Labs.

“With customer satisfaction and customer loyalty levels flat or declining in most industries, companies are scrambling to find solutions that meet short term necessities and provide lasting change. I am looking forward to continuing my engagement with the companies in OpenView’s portfolio and supporting their efforts in improving their customer service divisions,” said Bill Price.

“Bill’s experience and track record of success are undeniably impressive. Bill’s true value as an advisor is his unique ability to be both a thought leader in the space as well as a practical, execution-oriented consultant that can see projects though from conception to implementation,” stated James Armijo, VP of Customer Service of Kareo.

Bill Price is the Founder and President of Driva Solutions, a consultancy that focuses on customer contact strategies and operations. He founded Driva to help companies achieve the balance between cost containment and greater customer loyalty. He co-authored The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers From Customer Service, Keep Them Happy and Control Costs (Wiley, 2008) with David Jaffe. Prior to forming Driva Solutions, Bill was Amazon.com’s first Vice President of Global Customer Service, responsible for all customer service activities including managing the company’s contact centers in the US, Europe, Japan, and India. During these years, using the basic premises in this book, Amazon reduced its contacts-per-order by over 70 percent and also scored the second highest-ever customer satisfaction rating for any American company.

“Bill and I worked together to complete a gap analysis of Kareo’s current operations relative to his recommended best practices. Throughout the process, Bill was the consummate professional, always inquisitive and quick to learn the intricacies of Kareo’s business model, while keeping the project on task and delivering an actionable plan,” added James Armijo.

Bill has also collaborated with the OpenView team on content sharing best practices to customer service. To learn more, tune in to Labcast, a podcast series from OpenView.

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

About OpenView Labs
OpenView Labs is the strategic and operational consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, a global Venture Capital fund that invests in expansion stage technology companies. The Labs was formed to assist the management of OpenView portfolio companies build great companies by gathering, creating, storing, and disseminating best practices across all functional areas. The dedicated full-time teams, Senior Advisors, and network at OpenView Labs spend the bulk of their time working on behalf of the OpenView Venture Partner’s Portfolio companies. This work includes incubating methodologies, testing approaches, performing research projects, developing and implementing forums and workshops, gathering the best network and ideas for building great companies, and coaching the management of the portfolio companies.