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Schuyler Brown
I'm Schuyler, this is Founders@Fail we've got Jordi Leiser, founder of Stellar Service. Welcome to the show, what is Stellar Service?
Jordy Leiser
Stellar Service is about building transparency for customer service on the web. And what we do is evaluate companies to figure out which companies have amazing customer service in which companies don't have amazing customer service. And then we give that information back to shoppers to help them make better decisions. And we also give that information back to businesses to help them become better businesses.
Schuyler Brown
You know, usually I'm not gonna lie when I hear like, it's a win win pitch that's the first sign that it's complete Bs and, and somebody's losing in that equation. But I got to admit, and there's a reason for it, because I was working at DFJ Gotham, when we funded you, that's just about the sexiest pitch ever.
Jordy Leiser
It's good in that it definitely has a social good component to it, where we we truly believe that if we succeed as a business, that the world will be genuinely a better place to be a consumer to be a shopper. We hope that by doing what we're doing, it raises the bar, it forces everybody to become a better company when it comes to service. And so if all the companies become better companies, because they know that there's somebody out there testing them, then shoppers are just better off. So it's a nice, it's, it's a nice piece of the value proposition that we think
Schuyler Brown
So it's not like you've been around for a decade, but you've been around the block now a little bit, you have hit a pretty impressive inflection point you have now 4000, enterprises.
Jordy Leiser
We will get to 4000 by the end of the year,
Schuyler Brown
Walk me back to your first sale. How did it happen? How do you think about it? How did you approach it and what happened?
Jordy Leiser
So it was actually Zappos. And we decided to start we had we had two choices, we could either start with the biggest brands and the biggest companies and see if we could get just a couple to sign on and then see if we could get kind of a waterfall effect. Or we could start on the smaller end and see if we can just get a lot of traction, a lot of adoption from smaller companies. And so we want to take the the bigger route the former out. And so I reached out to Zappos actually, before we launched and said we're you know, we're going to be publishing these ratings, we collected a bunch of data. You know, not unsurprisingly, you guys were one of the top companies would you be interested in in being a part of this and being supportive. And we actually got an introduction to Tony Shea. And I guess, people within Zappos, were taking a look at it and said, You know, this totally makes sense. It's totally consistent with their vision. And the story just really, really resonates. It's like, having a third party out there that evaluates service objectively, and consistently, and then comes out with data to prove it and to show it. If you're one of the top companies, you want to be a part of that conversation. There's no reason not to. It was a risk, of course, it's always a risk for the guys that beginning to put their brand next to a startup brand. And Zappos is a billion dollar brand. And so it took, you know, it took a bit of a belief in what we were doing and who we were in order to go along with it.
We had we had two choices, we could either start with the biggest brands and the biggest companies and see if we could get just a couple to sign on and then see if we could get kind of a waterfall effect. Or we could start on the smaller end and see if we can just get a lot of traction, a lot of adoption from smaller companies.
Schuyler Brown
So how did you sell them on that vision? Because I'm not gonna lie. Zappos is I mean, the customer service is in the core of their DNA. So they don't really need you to to demonstrate the caliber of their customer service. It's, I mean, it is the most defining feature of why people use their service. All right, exactly.
Jordy Leiser
Well, that's part of the the argument for why we think this is such an attractive idea and business because even the guys who you would think need it, the least amount are all about it and onboard. It's interesting, the biggest companies feel like they, some of them, not Zappos, but some of them have something to prove, because they're so big, that they need to show that even big companies can care about their customers. Then again, on the on the smaller side of things, those guys feel like they're so small, how can they pot you know, customers might think, how could they possibly deliver the kind of service that a bigger company could so I need to show them through stellar service that I'm truly a great, a great company. Right? So
Schuyler Brown
getting down to the nitty gritty what specifically, were the concerns of Zappos as customer number one and how did you get over them?
Jordy Leiser
So you I mean, you touched on a credibility it's like what what gives you guys the authority? Why are people going to listen to you? And so John and i, when we started the company, we put months and months of research and and basically aggregation of people and ideas and thoughts about customer service people who managed global call centers, people who had written papers for decades on customer service, and put all the research that we could into this idea, and then showed that to the early customers and said, Listen, this is what we are. We are building, we want to try to bring in everything that anyone has ever written or thought or talked about for service, and truly provide a genuine comprehensive assessment and asking for people's feedback do you say is this does this represent the whole customer experience and showing them that we were truly passionate about it. And I think that kind of came across, this was a genuine thing that we were interested in. This is something that we wanted to build for the long term that we wanted to invest in them, just as they would invest in us as a brand and team up partner and help them grow. That's the whole point is we help these businesses grow and do more sales, because they convinced shoppers to be confident in them.
Schuyler Brown
So that's a lot of legwork. Before you had even one customer, you had to aggregate just best practices in the industry, you had to begin to actually build out a Salesforce to a mystery shoppers to actually get that data, and then bring it and present it to you know, prospective customers. So how did you manage that risk? When you had a heck of a lot of uncertainty whether anyone would even want it?
Jordy Leiser
It's sort of the the ultimate startup conundrum is that at the very beginning, you're willing to take all the risk in the world because You almost had nothing to lose John and i had been spinning our wheels for about a year messing with different, you know, kind of iterations of the idea. And at that point, we were just, you know, we we wanted to go all in, there was no reason not to, we literally had nothing like we were living in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and we were paying $200 a month in rent combined. You know, we we thought, you know, this was if there if we were going to do a business like this, we had to do all of the work up front. It's not, right. It's not one of these sort of startups where you just code up a page on a weekend. And like, boom, Chatroulette hits the web. And it comes like a global phenomenon. We had to do months and months of work to bring this thing together to be a credible brand, a credible business, a credible process, and then go out and get real big companies to, to believe in what we believe. And actually that's what was so great about this in the early stages, that it's really easy to believe in what we believe in, which is that transparency rules the day people should get better customer service, you would think that most companies would want to believe in that. And so because that's what we were pushing. That's what we were we were working on. It made sense to them initially, but it was it required all this upfront work. So we were crazy enough to try to figure it out.
Schuyler Brown
So I mean, that's a big vision, right? to, to actually sit down and think how can we make ecommerce, a more efficient, more effective, better experience period for everybody involved. And it's one thing I've discovered in talking to a lot of founders is that building a big vision is actually really important, too. It certainly was important to Zappos to get the sort of caliber of talent that you want involved to actually work for you and work with you. So walk me through as you started to scale your actual team and make your first hires. How important was that philosophy in attracting them? And and how do you leverage that sort of mantra?
Jordy Leiser
Again, because the story is, is such a good one, and it's like a feel good. Everybody wants to believe that we can live in a world with better customer service, and companies should be held accountable when they're not providing good service, everybody that we talked to an interview, and whether that's one of our shoppers, or whether that's somebody here in our office in New York, we have to get the sense that they want to be a part of that process. And luckily, there's just a lot of people who have been unfortunately burned by a bad customer experience, they bought something online, or they've even gone into a store or they've just had an experience with a company that was just so frustrating that by hearing our pitch, and by seeing that ultimately the goal and the mission and the vision for stellar service is to improve, you know, create a better world for customer service and create better experiences, as you said, sort of across the board and doesn't just end ecommerce. Ultimately we want to be in you know, every online category, whether it's travel or hospitality or entertainment or whatever. Everybody that we talked to has to believe in that and has to be a part of it. And for the most part, it's been very attractive and we've had a lot of inbound people are saying just I love what you guys are doing. I would love to be a part of it. Just because it is such a sort of a consumer friendly business idea.
Schuyler Brown
Yeah, I mean, that everybody loves a pretty picture with a you know a nice red bow wrapped around it. Obviously recruiting wasn't that easy for you
Jordy Leiser
That's that's more for the shoppers. So we get inbound all the time from people who want to be one of our people out there throughout the country that are evaluating the companies internally in New York, obviously, it's it's more of a challenge to hire.
Schuyler Brown
What are the qualifications for a great mystery shopper? I'm curious, because I'm not gonna lie. The gig sounds pretty nice.
Jordy Leiser
Yeah. So typically, we want people who have had either experience in retail working in retail, either in customer service or in some client facing side. Or we actually have some people who have been critic slash reviewers professionally in, for example, the restaurant space. So the hotel space. One woman who works for us is a Michelin restaurant ratings. person, you know, they, they effectively run a mystery shopping kind of operation where they go into restaurants, really fine restaurants throughout the world, and evaluate the ins and outs and nitty gritty of these restaurants, to ultimately end up providing these restaurants with what is probably the most prestigious thing that many of these restaurants go for, which is like Michelin stars, one, two or three stars. So anybody who has had that experience and being kind of on the inside as an investigator. And so you know, there's the retail piece, there's people who have been in customer service before, we we try to find people who really understand what it's like to be on both sides to be a customer service rep, but also be a, a shopper and consumer,
Schuyler Brown
How did you start to build out the inputs for this secret sauce that eventually became the Stila service rating system?
Jordy Leiser
So again, at the beginning, we we brought in academic research, we brought in market research, we looked at what are the things that across consumer studies in the last decade, people have said, when they shop online, these are the most important things for them.
Schuyler Brown
So walk me through some examples.
Jordy Leiser
So we built it into three different buckets, because all of the things that we had been learning and reading about and asking real, you know, business people about because we brought in practitioners, CEOs, and e commerce directors to guide us as well, was that these three big buckets were critical one, one of the buckets is the online experience, the interactive elements of the website. The second bucket is shipping and delivery in return. So everything that goes into ordering an item, sending it out the policies, the procedures, the logic and convenience of returning the item, how long it takes how well they are communicating everything around the shipping and returns experience. And then finally, is customer support. So the call support the email support? Can you engage with the company via live chat? How quick and responsive and well do they deliver service via social media? So those are the three big buckets that we built everything from the ground up into those three buckets. And it turned out that if you try to think of a way that you as a consumer, interact with any online business, they always fall within one of those three categories.
Schuyler Brown
And so how do you start to build out a taxonomy to structure that data because when I just think about my own shopping experiences, a lot of what I walk away from with this kind of halo effect of having a great experience, or On the flip side, having a really bad experience, in my mind is it's it's it's somewhat nebulous, it isn't necessarily one specific thing. But it might be a feeling that I got from my interaction, that's a hard thing to capture, and then structure. Yeah, and certainly to scale and normalize across every different permutation of an e commerce plan.
Jordy Leiser
The good thing about customer service is that it's not rocket science. You know, the most people when they go through a day to day experience interacting with a company, they can kind of tell you pretty quickly, what the customer experience felt like whether it was positive, neutral, negative, whatever. And if you really dig into it, you can go kind of bit by bit into their experience, and, and flesh out pretty well. What are the things that made it a terrible experience? broadly speaking, you kind of have like a, a, a quality and a speed component to service, right? So those are just the huge kind of elements of people say, well, it took forever or the person wasn't competent, or it was really, really fast. And it was just like amazing the way that they you know, dealt with the issue. And then everything kind of gets broken down from there to sort of sub layers and components. So what we found is as we dug into customer service, you're right, it's sort of on the surface feels like one of the things that's hard to quantify, yet, when we broke it down, we have like 350 ish metrics that really kind of encapsulate the full customer experience. And you can break things down bit by bit into elements of the of the, of the, of the experience.
Schuyler Brown
So walk me through what happens when you present a rating to a prospective customer or frankly an existing customer and they have a problem. They, they they don't believe it accurately reflects reflects their caliber of service. How do you handle that situation?
Jordy Leiser
So I'll just say, before I answer that is that most of the companies that we provide ratings for that are not top ratings are usually the responses usually we know we're not the best at service. And we'd love to get better. And we want to, we want to see the data. And we want to be able to compare ourselves to see how we can get better on the rare occasion that we talk to somebody who disagrees. And they say, well, we actually provide, you know, we think we provide amazing service. And you guys, apparently don't think that we're in that top category. It's very simple for us to just go to our data and say, Okay, well, this is the experience that we had. And these are the things we found about the policies of your business. And it turns out, you only have a 30 day return policy window, whereas some of your peers have a 90 year 365 day return policy, or this company over here offers Spanish call support, and you guys don't offer that as an option to customers. But are
Schuyler Brown
You offering that level of granular analysis for free?
Jordy Leiser
Right now, we're starting to communicate that for people who have big issues. We are preparing right now and building for the data solution where companies can actually tap in to see across thousands of companies and hundreds of metrics for each one of those companies. The actual data and metrics the benchmark across every every metric they want. So that that's that's becoming the most highly demanded piece of our business, for the b2b side is everybody wants to see the data. And so we're making that available for sale.
Schuyler Brown
So what's it going to take for you to actually make that happen?
Jordy Leiser
We have to build this, this basically this data solution through a SaaS platform. And so we're evaluating the different options. Right now we're looking at the different pieces, we're looking at a more of a snapshot data report versus an ongoing solution where people can track and measure their service and benchmark it, it's actually kind of similar to Gomez in just changing out the topic of what's being evaluated from web performance to customer service performance. So you know, a good example I like to use as you can ask shoppers all day long about what they think of the speed of your website, and you could just collect all this survey data about do you think it's fast? Do you think it's available enough, and people can give you their responses. But most companies hire Gomez to actually track and measure the speed and availability and uptime of the performance, because they want to know the performance. And they also want to know the feedback. So the same thing is true for service, you can ask customers, do they think it was a good experience? Yes or no? Did you? Did you find everything you were looking for? Yes or No, you can get some satisfaction information. But you also want to measure the service performance, just like you would for the web performance. And so you also now have the ability with us to benchmark that and layer on any other company that you want to see or track or measure on top of your own company's performance.
Schuyler Brown
Big Vision, super intuitive, sounds like a pretty gnarly technical solution. And difficult thing for you to manage without a technical background. So how do you approach that? How do you work with your technical team to ensure that they are actually building out what you envision?
Jordy Leiser
So we need to build up our technical team. As you mentioned, john and i, as to non technical co founders, the business wasn't really built on a technology to begin with, it was built on this process of evaluation of service. And then now it's becoming very much of a technology driven businesses we want to we have close to a million records. I think, actually our technical guys here, but we have we have close to a million records.
Schuyler Brown
By the way. They're not actually lying. They have one technical guy, and he is referred to as the technical guy.
Jordy Leiser
Mike, his name is Mike. And he's great. So anyway, we need we need we need to build a team around Mike. And that is that is top of mind right now. And
Schuyler Brown
I just like to also I have to give credit credit where it's due. It's about seven o'clock on Friday night. offices empty except I'm, I'm keeping this guy here because frankly, he doesn't have a choice. He's held hostage The only other guy in the office Mike. credibility, brother.
Give them a bonus. Yeah, I mean,
Jordy Leiser
yeah, he, he's he, he's the foundation, everything is built on the data on top of it. So
Schuyler Brown
I mean, you don't have to kiss his butt on camera. I'm just saying.
Jordy Leiser
We have a huge mountain of data. And at this point, it grows every single day. And actually, we had behavioral data as well. Because as the seal is displayed on these sites, then we actually can start to track the users who are on these sites where they're shopping on sites that have the seal, to start to collect behavioral data of all the shoppers that care about great
Schuyler Brown
So how does that happen? From an actual back end standpoint,
Jordy Leiser
We drop a cookie on any of the sites that are displaying the seal and can identify, you know, what, where shoppers are going, what they're looking at, and how granular in terms of what they're looking at, they have to click through or how are over,
No, just whatever page that they're on. It just makes a call to understand what what precise page they're on. Or if they go through Checkout, if our seal is through Checkout, then we can see, you know, did they purchase what was in the cart? It's pretty granular, actually. So there's an entire data, behavioral data business, sort of in the bank for us that we're, we're interested in, in, in evaluating and looking at, there's a lot of different options and opportunities for us to, to monetize that. And we're, we're not doing anything yet. Because that's not the core of our business, our our core business, what we do is we evaluate customer service. But it just so happens that we're building a very nice asset around behavioral data behavioral targeting. On top of that, so thinking of data, we have all this data, and we got to figure out the best way to give it back to, to people to us.
Schuyler Brown
And obviously, putting, you know, your investor hat on for a quick second, how do you make money around that? How do you how do you think about pricing strategies.
Jordy Leiser
So for the data, again, it's similar to kind of a Gomez model where you can pay to have a subscription to monitoring and measuring your service. In the same way, you always want to be on top of every touchpoint for your company. If you're a business director or CEO of a company, you really care and you think nonstop, at least if you're a customer centric about what's the end experience, like for all your shoppers. And so it's a very compelling product for everybody that we're talking to, to say stellar service can help. It's almost like an audit, they can always keep me on my game, they can always tell me if I'm starting to slip if my competition is moving in a different direction. If during the holiday season, certain metrics are going up and down for my team or for my competitors. And so for us to monetize that it's it's you know, it's a monthly subscription for companies to be on top their their service performance
Schuyler Brown
Makes sense. Now we've covered all the pleasantries I get to task, the fun questions. Who was the last prospect that said no to you and why?
Jordy Leiser
Last, the prospect for the seal business, which is basically kind of what we're the data solution, we're going to probably start to sell at the end of the year. So we haven't actually started selling, we're just collecting feedback from everybody, which has been really great. But for the SEO business, I think the last company that decided not to put the seal up and there's only been a handful,
maybe B&H Photo,
Schuyler Brown
Calling you out b&h
Jordy Leiser
Those guys are, they have great service, they just they think that you know that their shoppers have spoken more loudly that they believe that they're even better business, then what our data is communicating. And so we we have things that go into our evaluation that says that shoppers want to have the ability to do this or that. And we know that because we have all these studies, and we ask shoppers and we ask businesses, what is what they're finding to be important for customers. And so because they don't have those things, or offer certain things, and we couldn't give them the highest rating.
Schuyler Brown
So how do you turn that relationship around? what's what's your strategy at this point to begin to demonstrate the impact and the value that you provide?
Jordy Leiser
Well, in that case, and in most cases where the company is rated below eligibility for the seal, it's usually an immediate question that how can we buy the data from the company so it actually it feeds directly into our, into our other business model, which is selling the data? So once companies start to see the data, and actually, as we start to talk to companies about, they say, How can we get better, we're not a consulting company. So we don't consult on businesses, but we say, listen, customer service is pretty straightforward. You provide fast, friendly service, give them friendly customer service policies around shipping returns and customer support and be there for them, they start to add things to their business, they start to add 24, seven support, whereas before, they were just a nine to five operation, where they start to add the option for overnight shipping when before it was just standard four to six day shipping. They start to hire people on their team that deliver service through customer support that actually engage in the customer and ask questions and and really make it their point of no return to provide an amazing experience for the shopper. And so as we start to come out with what what are the things that make up our methodology that define great service. We've just been hearing anecdotally, actually, we got an email today from a company that said, we have already made hold is a publicly traded company and said we've made wholesale changes to our customer service proposition, because we want to be a more highly rated but obviously, more importantly, we want to make sure that we're providing the same kind of service that some of these other guys out there in our in our industry are. So I mean, that's a case in point example of us, just by our mere existence, companies are changing the way that they deliver service for the better. And hopefully all of us will reap the benefits. I can
Schuyler Brown
I mean, I'm broke so I'm not doing a lot of e commerce shopping. I'm not gonna lie But obviously this could potentially be a more critical sale during certain periods of of the year. So holiday shopping enormous. How do you approach that cyclical nature of interest from your perspective customers?
Jordy Leiser
I think everybody, today, just today I was talking to retail who a shoe company who's just now getting set up, you know, it's August, but he's starting to get set up for the holidays. And so he was telling me that they're they're thinking through things they're trying to understand, should they do different things around their email campaigns or different ways that they deliver service to bring in more people to, for the holidays specifically. And so it's funny in retail, specifically, the holidays start, like they start thinking about the holidays in the summer. And so, because of that, and because that's such a big piece of their year, obviously, for flowers, it's different, there's different seasons for each of the categories. But for us, it's it we haven't seen, I mean, in our you know, 15 months of being around, we haven't seen a huge change in the demand or interest for what we're doing, based on the time of year, because if it's not the holiday season, then people are trying to prepare for the holiday season, almost all the time. So everybody's trying to get set for that two month period where it's just it's crazy,
Schuyler Brown
So how do you I mean, you mentioned it earlier that you are not a consulting company, and you don't want to be, but my guess would be once you're selling the data, it's hard not to get lured in that direction. Because with data comes questions, and comes best practices, etc. How do you manage those expectations? And how do you keep at arm's length with customers? Who, frankly, could really derive a lot of value from that service? If you chose to offer?
Jordy Leiser
Yeah, well, it's really important for us to not head in that direction. I mean, just by the nature of what we do, we want to provide data and insight. And then we want to provide the signal back to the shoppers. And there's really no room for a consulting operation in that business model. So for that, to for the credibility to remain intact. And so we think about it a lot like a Google analytics platform, you look at your Google Analytics, even if you're brand new, and you see, okay, my traffic is going up, or my, you know, bounce rate is going this way. And to the extent that you understand what the metric is, you know that to be better for your business to get better, you want to increase traffic, or you want to reduce the bounce rate, or you want to increase the rate of conversion. There's other companies out there that will tell you, maybe strategically how to do those things. But that's not our business. And so what we can do is we can point them into the direction, we can say, Well, you know, this company over here is, you know, really good at strategic thinking around, you know, merchandising design, and these guys are, you know, outstanding, at outsource customer service, if that's what you're interested in. So, but that's what we want to do is just provide the insight the data, and then allow them to say, Okay, this I've seen now through stellar services data is a giant area of weakness for us, that I didn't really realize before, and then, you know, leave it to them, or maybe provide some sort of directory services where we could sort of send people to those vendors who could help them,
right. It's, it's got to be called out the business model that you have, in some sense, rewards, good actors. But and you talk about a big vision of helping improve the broader picture of the e commerce experience, but because bad actors aren't eligible for the stellar service seal, you aren't addressing the the worst of the that kind of, you know, asset class of, of the the guys who could most benefit from the best practices and analytics around where specifically they're failing. Yeah. And does that mean you're not pitching them? Or does that just mean that this is a kind of self reinforcing cycle that you provide a carrot?And hopefully, they recognize the value of that?
Yeah, we started to seen actually something that we didn't think was going to be as big of a driver than it has, as it has, which has been the press, and the press love nothing more than to highlight people who are doing, you know, bad things, or people who are scamming customers or they just love to find like the worst, right and blow it up. And so what we've seen is that somehow, you know, different press outlets have identified certain companies as not doing the thing that they should be doing to provide great service and blowing it up. And then those companies are then exposed. And, and it kills them to be in a place where people are talking about them in the press, that they're not providing great service because companies spend millions and millions of dollars every year trying to get the message across that they have, you know that they're a great company that provide great service that you you know, excellent Knowledge and you know, great prices or whatever. And so to the extent that what we're doing and we're just again, providing the data, so if the data says that XYZ company just treats their customers poorly, or they have really unfriendly policies, that just gets picked up so easily because the press love to just that's just a really juicy story.
Schuyler Brown
So are you saying you leaked that to the press? No, man swoop in is the Savior.
Jordy Leiser
No, we don't leak it. It's available. So you can see on our site, which companies are not approved, and then every once in a while we
Schuyler Brown
Publicly list who's not approved?
Jordy Leiser
Yeah, we do. And we know those companies come to us, in in some cases, like furious about, you know, these big, big companies furious and saying, This is ridiculous. How can you do this? How could you say this? And we say, Well, listen, we just, we just collect data, and then we score it, and then it turns into a score on our site. That's it. That's what we do. And so what it lights a fire under these guys,
Schuyler Brown
It most certainly would
Jordy Leiser
If we issue if we if we issue a press release about certain data points, like hard data points. For example, we just released an announcement about a month ago, showing the average email reply time and hold time call hold time for the top 100 retailers. So you know, one to 100. And we gave that to you know, we made that available. And so it's just a number and a company next to a number. And so people look at who's that the top people look at who's at the bottom. And then the story is all about who's at the top and who's at the bottom. And so whoever's at the bottom is, you know, kind of stuck in that unfortunate.
Schuyler Brown
I gotta be honest, that is one heck of a sales strategy. Yeah, you create a very powerful incentive to reach out and engage. Yeah, good stuff. This is Jordi. I'm Skyler. This has been founders of fail. Thanks a lot for being here.
Jordy Leiser
Thank you. Appreciate it.
