Mel Crone wants e-retailers to get technical---and he`s bet his savings on it
By MargaretAnn Cross
What makes Mark Crone tick is what isn’t ticking—or playing movies or sending faxes. That’s why the 32-year-old engineer turned consultant turned Internet entrepreneur has staked his career, not to mention his savings account, on a customer service business known as SupportCity.com. “Deep down, I am a problem solver.” says Crone, the New York company’s founder and CEO. “I like finding problems that cause pain for businesses and their customers, then coming up with creative solutions.”
For a customer who just bought a new DVD player from an online store, nothing causes more pain than making repeated and unsuccessful attempts to the site’s technical support area to find out why it won’t play movies as described. Without an answer—and soon—it’s likely the retailer also may feel the customer’s pain by getting the goods back. Crone, who considers technical support “the next frontier” for Internet retailers, wants to change all that. He believes that the experience should go something like this:
Unable to solve the problem by reading the instructions, the customer sits down at the computer and taps out the Web address for the site that sold him the product. He clicks on technical support, and up pops a page asking him to choose a manufacturer and product type from pull-down menus. That done, he chooses “Frequently Asked Questions.” And from there, he’s whisked off to the manufacturer’s site and to a page listing questions and answers expressly for that product—exactly where he needs to be. Browsing through the list, the customer finds the answer to the problem that has stumped him, grateful that others have “frequently” asked that question. Problem solved, the customer can sit back and enjoy the show.
This scenario illustrates everything the Internet promises to be: quick, efficient and better than interminable telephone calls to the manufacturer or a trip back to a brick-and-mortar store to search out a salesperson knowledgeable enough to offer any kind of help.
“Consumers are increasingly comfortable buying on the Web,” says Crone. “The hard part is using what they’ve purchased. It’s imperative that retailers focus more on helping consumers do that.”
Research proves his pilosophy. According to e-commerce rating firm BizRate, the 20% of shoppers who contact Web stores for customer service of any kind are 23% less likely to return to those stores, than those who don’t seek assistance. Yet no e-retailer selling electronics is equipped to offer technical support for the dizzying array of makers and models out there. Crone says he’s hit on the solution with SupportCity, which supplies Web merchants with electronic content that consumers access directly from retail sites. Customers who click on technical support at Buy.com—one of SupportCity’s dozen clients—never know they’ve left the discount retailer’s site until they land on the manufacturer they need. But Crone’s site has led them there, powered by a database containing links to 1,100 manufacturers’ Web sites, along with definitions for 9,500 technical terms, locations of 6,500 service providers, product descriptions and other relevant information.
Crone’s challenge is to build breadth and volume, and that means lining up a crowd of retailers and manufacturers behind his idea. “Getting SupportCity to a critical mass quickly is key,” says Robert Evans, a principal investor who’s president of Aspect Development, a Mountain View, Calif. firm that creates software and offers consulting services. “As the number of people who use the service increases, so does the number of retailers and parti-cipating manufacturers, so the value to all three parties grows exponentially.”
Keeping customers happy
Crone has the tenacity to make it work, says Evans, who was Crone’s boss when both worked in the supply chain practice at Andersen Consulting in the mid-1990s. That’s where Crone hit on the idea for SupportCity. “I worked with some of the biggest companies in the world and saw how they struggled with serving their customers, especially after the point-of-sale,” says Crone. “They wanted to know how to keep the customer happy, how to keep the relationship going.”
Crone decided SupportCity was the answer. After giving his idea a few years to gel, Crone ran it by Evans and a few others he respected. They liked what they heard, and in May 1997, Crone quit what Evans calls “an outstanding career in consulting” to write his business plan. He seeded the business with $100,000 in savings, later boosted by Evans’s investment.
The decision to strike out on his own came easy, Crone says. “I never wavered. I decided I could take my money and invest it in the stock market or I could invest in my own venture. I had confidence in what I was working on, so it made much more sense for me to plow my money into SupportCity.”
Leaving Andersen wasn’t the first time Crone stepped away from a solid job to try something new. Earlier, he had been designing engines as a mechanical engineer at Ford Motor Co. when he decided to quit and get his MBA, which led to his consulting job.
The analytical skills Crone developed as an engineer helped him succeed as a consultant, and he honed those skills working with businesses to solve logistics issues at Andersen. He used sales data and other information to help clients determine where they should locate their warehouses, for example—“classic industrial engineering problem,” he says.
The same skills come in just as handy running an Internet business. “The skill I’ve drawn on most often from my past life as a consultant is the ability to approach problems and communications very logically,” he says. Because ideas move quickly on the Internet and can spin out in so many directions, thinking logically is a survival skill, a way to keep the business on track. At the same time, Crone relishes the many surprises and solutions to problems that come his way. “No two days are ever the same,” he explains. “You have no idea who is going to call you on a given day and propose some really interesting idea that may turn your business in a slightly different direction. That’s lacking at more traditional industrial companies, where things are much more predictable and your time is spent in ways that are consistent across days.”
Crone is merging the two worlds with SupportCity, which set out to solve an age-old business problem: giving customers both good information and good technical support for what they buy. The problem, hardly unique to online stores, is amplified by the fact that physical stores typically carry several thousand products, while many e-retailers sell tens of thousands. Yet Crone says the Internet also offers novel ways of solving technical support troubles. SupportCity’s information is almost all Web-based, and it’s shared over the Internet.
Customers find SupportCity’s services both easy to access and easy to understand, says Buy.com executive Franny Kirchoff, whose superstore uses SupportCity to back up the lines of computer hardware, software and consumer electronics it sells.“It would take us a considerable amount of time to gather the information that SupportCity provides,” she says. Buy.com previously referred customers to the manufacturer, using a list of toll-free phone numbers. But now, says Kirchoff, “our customers have better information, and that’s eased the burden on our customer service department representatives.”
In these still-early stages of SupportCity’s development, Crone has worked closely with retailers to identify the information they most want to give consumers. Along the way, SupportCity’s products have evolved. Retailers that sign up for the basic version give their customers a list of manufacturers, coupled with a long list of information on how to contact the company or link to its Web site. A newer and more sophisticated version gives consumers a third option for narrowing down their request—product type—and they receive a much shorter list of information targeted to the product.
SupportCity’s latest and priciest version lets consumers select a manufacturer, product type and form of support. They can head directly to a manufacturer’s technical support site, link up with a service center, browse a list of term definitions, check out third-party links or scroll through information on parts and accessories. If Crone can convince manufacturers to give him data on all of their products, SupportCity also plans to add that.
Along with technical support features, SupportCity allows consumers to create a personal “supportfolio” that keeps track of their searches as well as the goods they have purchased.
Retailers pay fees that range from $1,000 to $8,000 per month to incorporate SupportCity services into their customer service and technical support features. The price varies according to the number of manufacturers listed.
For all these advantages, signing up with SupportCity doesn’t allow retailers to set themselves apart from the competition, says David Cooperstein, research director at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. Though it is a good way to connect customers to technical support, he adds, each online store using SupportCity is giving customers the same information. “It doesn’t give retailers differentiation based on the content they’re providing. Some retailers will want to build their own content.”
That’s just the problem, says Crone, who wants to make technical support a more unified and consistent experience. Customers seeking technical support generally aren’t happy customers, he explains, so original content may do more to frustrate than engage them.
Nor does assembling the site’s technical content—and keeping it up and current—come cheap. Crone employs three full-time staff members and also brings in freelancers when needed to keep SupportCity up to date. The information his staff assembles isn’t in itself a competitive issue, he says.
“Consumers are increasingly using the technology surrounding them, and it’s becoming much more important in their lives,” maintains Crone. “A cell phone is much more than a toy—it’s a critical communication tool. People really just want it to work.”
Mark Reed Crone
— Experience
June 1997 to present: Founder and CEO, SupportCity.com, New York City
August 1993 to May 1997: Manager in the logistics and supply chain practice, Andersen Consulting, New York
August 1989 to August 1991: Mechanical engineer, Ford Motor Co, Dearborn, Mich.
Organizations: National Association of Purchasing Managers, International Center of New York (language instruction for immigrants), Association of Support Professionals.
‚ Education 1989: B.S. in industrial engineering and economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. 1993: MBA in corporate finance, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. 
|
