OpenView Partners Hosts Customer Service Workshop for Portfolio Companies
Last week, Boston based venture capital firm, OpenView Venture Partners hosted its portfolio companies in a two-day interactive Customer Service Forum led by Bill Price and Doug Cassell from Driva Solutions, a firm which focuses on customer contact strategies and operations. Participants of the workshop included CEOs and Directors of Client/Customer Service from OpenView’s portfolio companies and prospect companies. Throughout the interactive workshop Price and Cassell discussed stage-relevant lessons to produce best customer service.
“Customer service deals with customer issues that are anticipated or unanticipated, and making those customers feel like you are really listening to them, focusing on their wants and needs, and educating them how to deal with those issues in the future,” noted Bill Price, the lead co-author of The Best Service is No Service.
Based upon Price’s book The Best Service is No Service, Price and Cassell put emphasis on customer-centric approach, customer care and technical support, and the data analysis for effective customer services, and these several methods encourage portfolio companies to take an action.
Venture Partner George Roberts stressed the importance of the customer service for expansion stages companies. He said, “It is critical to keep your customers happy around your product or services that they use. We have seen that many companies tend not to talk with their customers enough. Customer service gives you an excellent channel to talk to the customers and get tremendous feedback to improve your products and services as well as customer satisfaction which strengthens your competitive advantage.”
“Every quarter we try to organize a forum or workshop to improve the understanding of a particular issue within the portfolio. We organized this particular forum around customer service because it is so important for any company to learn the benefits of a well-functioning customer service department. For example, a company can take the information it learns during the support process, incorporate that knowledge to understand why the issues are happening in the first place and overall improve the product, service and other touch points for the customers,” said Scott Maxwell, Senior Managing Director.
Jackie Golden, VP of global services of AtTask, a provider of on-demand project management software, said, “I came to the customer service forum to gain some insight into new ways, new models, new industry standards around customer service related to SaaS companies, because [the SaaS industry] is fairly new market and all the standards you see in services industries in general are still based on a lot of old models.”
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 AtTask
The AtTask project and portfolio management (PPM) solution focuses all knowledge workers on those activities that make them and their company more effective, innovative, and competitive. This platform-independent and multilingual solution increases efficiency for small- to medium-sized businesses and Fortune 500 companies across the globe. AtTask’s clients include American Airlines, Chevron, Cisco Systems, GE Healthcare, Google, HBO, Johnson & Johnson, Newsweek, Samsung, Toyota, and Whirlpool.