Stone Cobra

Customer service is a disciplined and exacting affair — part art and part science, it makes many demands on agents and their organizations and requires a good deal of automation to support numerous activities.  Historically, there have been many software companies offering a part of the overall solution that call centers pick from to produce solutions that meet their distinct needs.  However, quite often an organization fails to achieve its goals.  It runs out of money for this or that application, decides to build it “someday” or figures out a workaround — too often involving a spreadsheet. 

The results are uneven.  One call center might excel in training its agents while another might be superior in first call resolution or call deflection to other channels.  Too often the result is customer dissatisfaction but the dissatisfaction is often unique to the particular call center.  The idea of buying or building a call center system and then supplementing it with point solutions has been around a long time and while it might have been a good one a decade or more ago, it has taken us as far as possible. 

The call/contact/service center is too important to a company’s mission today for it to fail for lack of tools that can make the difference for customer experience and, ultimately, loyalty.  Also, most call centers have so much invested in both time and money that changing out their systems is something they must consider carefully.  So improving an existing solution is a logical step.

Stone Cobra is a solution that fills in the gaps, where they exist in call center systems in use today.  The company’s unique idea is to build a complete suite of relevant applications that complement core call center functionality (or replace complicated, unused processes) and to pre-integrate them with popular systems (e.g. Siebel, Salesforce’s Service Cloud).  The result is a layer it calls Systems of Engagement (SE).  The SEs accesses data held in CRM, communities, Knowledge Management systems and other enterprise applications (Figure 1), process it and present the most relevant information to the agent.

Figure 1 Systems of Engagement.  Source, Stone Cobra

The idea that a system of engagement can provide a layer between systems of record and the user is not new.  For instance, two decades ago products like PowerBuilder emerged to present a GUI interface for mainframe green screens.  While this analogy may be imperfect it can provide a good metaphor for what Stone Cobra does.  The idea coincides with the research of at least one of us (Esteban Kohsky described Customer Service 4.0 involving mashups in 2010).

Stone Cobra is all about providing a Web 2.0 experience for the user, which enables better employee engagement and may lead to greater customer satisfaction.  The product is designed to reduce or eliminate mouse clicks and to anticipate some of the information that might be required in a customer interaction that often may need to be culled from multiple systems.  There are seven applications or systems of engagement in the product.  Briefly they are:

• High Volume Case Responder
• Knowledge Centered Support
• Advanced Case Management
• Agent Productivity Tools
• Real-Time Training & Coaching
• Problem Management
• Kepner-Tregoe Resolve

Without a doubt a company can buy these kinds of solutions from multiple vendors and while Stone Cobra’s products are good what differentiates them are their integration with each other and their out of the box integration with Siebel, Salesforce Service Cloud Inquira and Instranet.

The company is made up of CRM industry veterans, mostly from the call center space and includes co-founders Amanda Roberts (CEO) and Scott Sanders (CTO) they have a pedigree that goes back to Octane, a call center application that was bought by Siebel about a decade ago.  The cash from that deal combined with the co-founders’ reputations have enabled the company, in its early stages, to sell without a formal sales team and enabled the company to refrain from taking on venture capital.

The product is built as a native Force.com application and is therefore delivered as a cloud-based solution.  Stone Cobra says it has built all of the applications it intends to so the product is complete though innovation will continue.  The close relationship with Salesforce means the company also tries to match subscription pricing terms, price and discounts when selling into that community.  Pricing tiers are: two applications $39/user/month, four applications $69/user/month, all apps $99/user/month.  Still the company derives most (70%) of its revenue from consulting, not product sales, a condition it expects to invert in the near future.

We think this solution has legs and the company has legs owing to its veteran leadership and deep experience.  The big issue we see is that the company will always need to react to changes in the underlying products’ functionality.  Any vendor could decide to add functionality that directly competes with Stone Cobra if it wants to.  Also, any of the call center products could age out or otherwise cause customers to consider migrating away.  But if Stone Cobra is as in tune with customer-centricity as it presents then it should be able to weather any such difficulties because it will have a loyal following.