Ann Arbor's ForeSee Results was founded in 2001 by Compuware and CFI Group with a mission to apply the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) to websites in order to measure visitor satisfaction, identify areas of improvement and offer predictive analysis.
Larry Freed, now the company's president, left his position as vice president of Compuware's e-commerce solutions group to run fledgling ForeSee.
Despite a challenging start --the company's first beta customer was the week after the September 11th attacks-- ForeSee has seen rapid and steady growth, attracting more than 450 clients, including: Comcast, Kellogg Co., Borders Group Inc., The IRS, Home Depot, Best Buy, Forbes.com, Harley-Davidson and the NHL.
In 2006, the company achieved profitability.
Last week Compuware Corp. sold its stake in ForeSee. Days later the company announced a $20 million from Investor Growth Capital, a Sweden-based international investment firm and Updata Partners, a technology VC firm based in Virginia with offices in New York and New Jersey.
metromode's managing editor Jeff Meyers spoke with ForeSee's president Larry Freed about the future of his company and his industry.
With the Internet's rise in power, ForeSee has seen a significant amount of growth these last few years. Where do you think the web analytics industry is headed?
What's interesting is when we talk about web analytics and web metrics there are many kinds of solutions. Probably the most popular is Quickstream analytics (Web Trends, etc), which focuses on people's behavior while on the website, which is an old model for measuring the success of websites. You know, "Hey, I had three thousand visitors today, my average page use is quarter of a million and they're spending 3.4 minutes on my site and viewing an average of 2.4 pages." But at the end of the day those metrics don't really tell us whether we've accomplished anything.
We think the best performance metric for website experience asks: Did the user accomplish what they wanted, did we really satisfy them? We don't consider ourselves a survey company, we consider ourselves a customer satisfaction company and we focus on that attribute. There aren't many people doing what we do, it's a very fragmented market.
So, how exactly are you different from a survey company?
We all know that when we ask a question, depending on how we ask it, that will determine the value of the answer. When we're talking about data like this it's incredibly critical that we can rely on it. Because some data isn't better than no data at all.
What the ACSI gives us is incredible precision, accuracy and reliability. More importantly, however, it provides us with predictablility. In other words, within the methodolgy there's a very sophisticated set of algorithms that allows us to determine if you make an improvement on a particular aspect of your website, this is the impact you can expect to see with regard to customer satisfaction and future behaviors. This sets us apart from the survey companies.
We intercept visitors as they're on the site or leaving the site or after a purchase, ask them a set of questions then analyze their responses using the ACSI technology which then calculates scores and impacts for us, giving us meaningful information about their experience.
Do you see an opportunity for the industry to "grow up" in his region?
Maybe. Right now it's a pretty fragmented industry. There are a handful of companies here that are national in scope that deal with web experience like Fry and Enlighten and, of course, Google Ad Words. They understand that it's all about the Internet, it's all about the effectiveness of your website. There's actually a fair amount of synergy between us but I don't know if we'll make this the center of web measurement. I think the real key to success for the city and the state is to have a series of companies that can grown and be successful and stay here. Which is exactly what ForeSee intends to do.
What are ForeSee's prospects for the future?
Well, there's been a lot of good news lately. We've seen our staff grow by 50% in just two years. Every day there are more opportunities presented to us than we can close customers in a day. More and more marketing is coming to the web, so companies are creating microsites and focusing their efforts there. Our focus has been on North America, pretty much across all industries; from the federal government to retail to consumer products to healthcare and financial services. But we plan on broaching the International market in the near future. The recent investment will definitely help us do that.
You say you intend to add 20-30 positions over the next year. What makes a strong candidate for your company?
There are things that go beyond skills that are really really important. Obviously we look for people with the right background, whether it's marketing, research, technology but I think more important than that is for people to have great passion for what they're doing and to have passion for the industry and organization they're working for. We get incredible feedback from our clients becuase we believe that it's all about satisfying your customers, which is what we, in turn, tell them. Every person in this company believes that. If I satisfy my customers I'm going to do a good job and ForeSee's going to do a good job. What we sell and what we deliver is pretty much the same, which makes it easy for us to be passionate about what we do.
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