Our interview with ClixConnect.com
A few months ago, we met Mitchell Cohen at SXSW. He’s a passionate entrepreneur who’s already sold one of his companies, and is starting another (or two). Did I mention he’s 20? His new company, ClixConnect.com, offers 24/7/365 live-chat support for the little guy (aka not Nordstrom or Amazon). I love stories like this, and we’ll continue to follow Mitchell’s path to complete world domination. In the meantime, chew on this interview:
Tell us a little about yourself? Who are you? How old are you? What’s your background?
I just finished my third year of university at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
I am essentially a serial entrepreneur; I was the kid sitting in front of his lemonade stand everyday in the summer (and not only that, I had a hot chocolate stand in the winter, I grew up in CanadaïŠ). I started a tech consulting company with a friend as a fun summer project about 4 years ago. We grew it and it was acquired last summer (June ‘06). I can’t sit still, so now I’m working on this project with a friend from school here in Montreal (his name is Miki, he started a CD/DVD distribution company 5 years ago, [and] it is profitable). I’m also working with a group in another .com startup at the present time (that one is much, much larger in scale; we’re in stealth mode there, so I can’t say much).
I am 20. I was born in Toronto, Canada, lived in Reno, NV and Chicago, IL for a few years, and then decided to make the loop and return to Canada for school.
Learn more about ClixConnect now.
Where did the idea for ClixConnect come from?
I love to do my shopping online, because it doesn’t matter if it’s 1:00 AM or 1:00 PM, it can be done anytime. The problem, however, is that most smaller online merchants cannot justify the cost of having someone around 24/7 to staff a live-chat tool. As such, when you’re browsing their site at 1:00 AM, there’s no one around to help you if you have a question. For these smaller guys, this is a huge competitive disadvantage because they’re not really 24/7, like a Nordstrom’s or eBay, both of whom have 24/7 live chat support. Visitors to these smaller merchants’ websites MAY send an e-mail inquiry when live-chat is closed, and even if they do that, there is no guarantee that they won’t purchase from a competitor while waiting for a response. We decided to setup a service enabling small online merchants to create a big-merchant feel for their websites, and ensure that prospective customers do not defect to the competition simply because they can’t get an answer to their question. If you’re paying $2.00 a click to get someone to your site from Google, it would be a shame to lose a prospective customer (and $2.00) just because they couldn’t find an answer to their question.
Who’s involved? How many people are working with you? For you?
There are two of us in Montreal; myself and a friend of mine, Miki. We manage the business. We have a team of 4 people monitoring the live-chat service 24/7, to ensure that all inquiries are responded to quickly and efficiently. We are working with 1 coder, from Romania, who has done a fantastic job on developing the back-end software.
What are the roles of the people involved?
Myself – Ops, customer support, marketing
Miki – Sales, marketing
How does it work?
A subscriber signs up for our live-chat service at www.clixconnect.com. We then create an account for them within 24-hours, customized to meet their specifications (custom logo, greetings, etc.). We send the subscriber a tiny HTML code snippet, which they can then install on their website (or we can do it for them, free of charge) (this is what enables the ClixConnect live-chat button on and proactive up-sell/cross-sell tool their website). Then, subscribers are able to respond to chat inquiries on their website using the ClixConnect operator console (which can be run online from ClixConnect.com, or can be downloaded onto their computer). When the subscriber is not logged in, or does not respond to an incoming chat inquiry after a predetermined amount of time, the inquiry is automatically forwarded to a ClixConnect operator. The ClixConnect operator will respond to the chat inquiry on behalf of the subscriber using information obtained from the subscriber when they first signed up. If the operator is unable to find the answer to the website visitor’s question using the information obtained at signup and information available on the subscriber’s website, the operator can place an outbound call to the subscriber (if the subscriber wishes) to find out the answer to the website visitor’s question. The operator will then respond to the website visitor with the information obtained in the phone call.
The other feature, the automated up-sell/cross-sell is included in the HTML snippet sent to the subscriber (in the previous section). This tool enables the website owner to specify automated chat messages to appear when website visitors are on certain pages of their website. Say you are a clothing outlet. You can specify that, after 10-seconds of viewing a certain red shirt on your website, a chat box appears recommending a nice pair of blue pants to go with that red shirt. The website visitor could then view the blue pants by clicking the link in the chat box, or could respond to the inquiry by typing a response into the chat box, at which point the operator console rings with an incoming chat request (subscriber then ClixConnect operator). There are timeout settings which can be adjusted so that website visitors do not get annoyed by receiving too many proactive messages during one visit.
Learn more about ClixConnect now.
How are you funded?
100% bootstrapped!
Where do you hope to be 1 year from now? 5 years? 10 years?
1 year – We hope to have a strong customer base (400+ customers), be profitable, and be having a great time doing what we’re doing.
5 years, 10-years – I can’t really speculate that far into the future. Remember, I’m only 20. If you had asked me 10-years ago where I thought I’d be in 10-years I’d probably have told you that I would be a professional hockey player, and in the off season, I’d be swimming with Shamu at SeaWorld. I’m an opportunist. I go where the opportunity takes me ïŠ
Another Point:
Miki and I are both very intensely community-focused. We have a passion for bettering our communities and the world in general. In an effort to do our part, we have developed a 5/5 initiative. With this initiative, we are donating 5% of our profits and 5% of our service capacity for ClixConnect to non-profits. It’s a small thing, I know, but we’re trying our best to do our part.
Now, some questions from my perspective as a potential client.
Who is handling the support? Is it your local team or do you outsource?
Half and half. Miki and I try to get as many inquiries as possible. When we’re not around (or sleeping, for those 3–4 hours per dayïŠ), we have a back-end team that takes care of incoming inquiries.
Right now, I’m handling most of our support. I have somewhat specific techniques I use to communicate with our users. We are very friendly, personal and have tons of Aw Shucks appeal. How do you handle representing a variety of corporate cultures?
We tailor our representation strategies to meet the needs of each individual client. Every time we acquire a new client, we go through a rigorous process of understanding the client’s business culture, and then transfer that knowledge to our support team over the course of a few training sessions. We’re still very small. As such, we can be very flexible when it comes to our strategies in working with clients. We are here to make our clients happy, and we’ll do everything in our power to make that happen.
Learn more about ClixConnect now.
How much is your service?
Tiered pricing model, based upon ClixConnect operator minutes desired:
$49/mo. – 100 minutes/mo.
$139/mo. – 350 minutes/mo.
$299/mo – 1000 minutes/mo.
We can create custom packages for 1000 minutes/mo. +
How are you planning to scale? (Meeting the needs of tons of requests once you’re huge)
Our outsourced team of support agents can scale very quickly. Anytime we hit 70% of total capacity, we will add another agent. We will not let ourselves hit above 75% capacity, ever.
How do you protect against outages and downtime? How are you ensuring 24/7/365?
Outages and downtime – We have redundancies in place to prevent against this. We also host our software on high-quality, dedicated servers.
Ensuring 24/7/365 – We have 3–4 operators online and responding to chat inquiries at any given time, 24/7/365. If one needs to step away for 10-minutes, the others will cover his/her position.
Do you handle any support yourself?
Yes. As was the case with my previous company, I try to take inquiries whenever possible. Additionally, I handle all customer/billing/installation issues.
I think it would be interesting to learn how you are building your team. Especially for a company like this, finding good people is paramount. Walk us through what you have in mind for building an amazing team.
We plan on taking on a team of experts in customer interaction and business development once we reach the appropriate scale. Individuals looking to work with us need to be intensely focused on one thing; the customer. That’s the only requirement we have. Everything else can be learned as time progresses.
Learn more about ClixConnect now.