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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | DECEMBER 27, 2000 MOVERS & SHAKERS By Jeanette Brown The Woman with All the Right Answers? Louise Kirkbride is impressing even tech-wary investors with Broad Daylight, a startup whose Web customer-relations software automates companies' replies to questions
Not Louise Kirkbride. When she was accepted by California Institute of Technology in 1970, the first year it opened its doors to women, there was never any doubt in her mind that she was going -- even though her parents said no. She ran away in the night after the Pasadena school informed her she would be getting a full scholarship. Though her parents went to court in an effort to have her returned to their Philadelphia home, she declared herself an independent minor, supported herself -- and never returned. EVEN IN A SLOWDOWN. Why did she do it? "Caltech was the hardest place to get into," Kirkbride explains. It wouldn't be the last time she set out to do a very hard thing. Right now, the 47-year-old entrepreneur is trying to build her year-old Silicon Valley startup, Broad Daylight Inc., in the midst of the economic tumult sweeping the high-tech world. She's CEO of the Santa Clara-based company, whose software improves customer service by letting companies tap databases of previous questions to provide immediate answers on their Web sites or extranets. After an initial $8 million round of funding from investors such as Softbank Venture Capital, Nexus Group, and Angel Investors, she launched the company in February, 2000. It seems she has staked her claim in a fertile spot. According to Forrester Research, the market for knowledge-based/Web-enabled customer service is poised for growth. Forrester analysts expect that the percentage of queries handled by Web-enabled systems like Broad Daylight's will rise to 87% by 2002 -- up from 37% today. Those handled by phone, in contrast, are expected to fall to 13% from 54%. Citing these figures, Kirkbride says she expects an increasing number of companies to be out looking for the most economical way of providing stellar customer service. More to the point, she believes the trend will grow even in the face of an economic slowdown, as companies feel the pressure to satisfy more customers at a lower cost. Her company, which employs 50 people, already has 40 clients -- a promising start that bolsters Kirkbride's hopes of turning a profit in the fourth quarter of 2001. DOWN TO EARTH. Kirkbride's journey to online customer-service followed an extraordinary route. After completing her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering at Caltech, she went to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she organized and decoded information beamed back from deep-space satellites. While there, she applied to become the first civilian astronaut in the U.S. Space Shuttle Program -- and made it to the final round of 80 applicants, out of an original pool of 8,000. When she didn't make the final cut, Kirkbride decided she had had her fill of JPL and gravitated toward customer service. "I have always believed that intelligent questions deserve intelligent answers," she explains. Frustrated by too many help desks that failed to deliver, she founded her first company, Answer Systems, in 1980. "There I was in Silicon Valley with a problem that needed to be solved. I think to myself, 'What do people do in the Valley?' So I wrote a piece of software," she says. It might seem an odd switch -- from rocket science to answering commonplace customer queries -- but Kirkbride doesn't think so. "People frequently ask me why I started my first company, and I reply: 'Because it was the hardest thing I could think of to do.'" And, she says, it sure wasn't easy: "I had absolutely no idea how to write a business plan: that I had to go to investors with clear financial projections or [have] a sales model. I learned from the first 50 people who said no to me," she jokes. DYNAMIC PAGES. But despite the rocky road, that piece of software helped to automate the traditional help desk by providing those answering the queries with easy, searchable access to every question answered in the past. Even better, when a question came in that hadn't been encountered before, the response was added to the database, which was continuously updated. Her brainchild was snapped up by retailer J.C. Penney, which purchased the application to run customer-service operations for its 1,400 stores. Signing that deal brought more attention to the fledgling company, and Answer Systems was soon able to list General Electric, Barclays Bank, NASA, and Motorola among its clients. In 1995, Answer Systems was acquired by Chicago-based Platinum Technologies for $40 million. While Kirkbride stayed with Platinum to help integrate her application, she also began to wonder if there might not be even greater opportunities for automated customer service. So, after Kirkbride reshaped her original idea for the Web and licensed some of the intellectual property back from Platinum, Broad Daylight was born. As Kirkbride describes it, Broad Daylight's software does away with the frustrating problem of answering the same question over and over again. In fact, queries are never answered more than once. "Think of these huge companies with even larger customer pools, thanks to the Internet," says Kirkbride. "Statistically, there is almost no way to be the first person answering a particular question." With her software, each question is answered only once, automatically published on the Web site, and then delivered to additional customers on a self-service basis. And unlike the FAQs available on many Web sites, those generated by Broad Daylight's software are not static compilations of questions that the company believes might crop up. Instead, they are dynamic pages, continuously updated with new queries and their answers. Customers can do searches by subject matter to ferret out the answers. SELLS ITSELF. It's a nifty solution, and happily for Kirkbride, it seems to make financial sense as well. A recent study by Forrester shows that employing greater automation to answer customers' questions dramatically cuts costs. Handling a customer inquiry by Web self-service costs just $1.17, vs. $10 to reply by e-mail, and $33 to do so by phone. Because she can so quickly demonstrate the savings potential, Kirkbride hasn't had a struggle winning customers. "The technology has more than returned on the investment made for it," says Gisselle Miranda, product manager of the AActive American Traveler Club (AATC) division of American Airlines, where Broad Daylight's software has been in use since July, 2000. According to Miranda, the airline is now looking at using the technology at its other divisions. The software is available on a hosted basis or in a licensed version. With the hosted version, answers to customer questions are stored on Broad Daylight's computers at a cost that starts at $5,000 per month and increases according to volume. The licensed version is available to those who wish to use the software within their firewalls, and it starts at $120,000. Kirkbride expects to see profitability within the year, and Heidi Roizen, Softbank Venture Capital managing director, is confident about her prospects. "I don't go to bed worrying that she's going to lose her motivation or fall down on the job," Roizen says. "She'll get it done -- or she'll die trying." ROADS LESS TRAVELED. Now, as she concentrates on signing more customers to a roster that has grown to include Bell Canada, Raychem, AT&T, and VIPdesk.com, Kirkbride hopes she has put the task of securing funding behind her. The company announced a second round of funding, amounting to $12.3 million, on Dec. 19. That brings the total raised to $20.8 million. Despite the difficult tech environment, Softbank's Roizen is optimistic: "It's a pretty wild-and-woolly time in terms of investing in startups, but not with Broad Daylight. We've invested all the way to what we believe will be the final round to take us through to profitability." When not hard at work, Kirkbride and engineer husband Joe Lipes enjoy season tickets to the San Francisco Opera and traveling to "out-of-the-way places," as Kirkbride describes some of the couple's destinations. Last year, it was the Arabian Peninsula, and the year before, Kenya. On the schedule for this winter: Antarctica. But even her trips aren't all fun and games, says Broad Daylight Chief Technology Officer Charlie Isaacs, who also worked with Kirkbride at Answer Systems. "I'm constantly monitoring the papers when Louise goes on vacation," he quips. "She's an adventurer and forever headed to hot spots. We're always thinking she's going to get thrown into prison or something." Even in the midst of her travels, Isaacs says his boss seldom stops thinking about Broad Daylight. In fact, just back from one trip in the earliest days of the company, she informed the staff she wanted them to develop a software tool that a company could use to build its fully customized Q&A site in less than 48 hours. The people in the room looked at her as if she were crazy. "But then she flashed us that Louise smile," he recalls. And three months later, the goal had been met.  Brown writes about Internet companies for Business Week in New York  | | |
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