fnMentoring: Richard White, UserVoice

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fnMentoring functions accelerate your startup and expand your high-tech network through mentoring sessions with founders and featured guest experts. Functions are free to members but require your RSVP. If you are not a member you can apply here.  Next week’s featured topic & guest will be:

 Topic Description: Customer Care and Retention

Richard White, Co-founder and the CEO of UserVoice

Richard White, Co-founder and the CEO of UserVoice

Name: Richard White

Bio: Richard White is a Co-founder and the CEO of UserVoice, where he focuses on making sexy products for un-sexy markets like customer service. Prior to UserVoice, Richard was the lead designer on Kiko.com, a Y-Combinator funded Calendaring product that drew praise for it’s clean design and which was sold on eBay for $258K. After Kiko, Richard founded SlimTimer, simple time tracking for freelancers, where he experimented with name-your-own-price Freemium models. The common thread throughout all these ventures is Richard’s passion for building wonderfully simple productivity tools with delightful user experiences. He’s proud to say that his works give people more time to waste rather than waste more of their time. Richard’s expertise lies in UI design & UX but in a past life he graduated with BS in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.

Company: UserVoice, launched in 2008, is a San Francisco-based startup focused on empowering customers to speak and companies to understand.

UserVoice was born out of Richard White’s frustration trying to understand his customers. In 2006, while working on Kiko.com, Richard was consumed by collecting customer feedback. He wanted to know what people thought of the product, but it involved hours combing through countless forum threads, blog comments and emails and resulted with little to show for his efforts.

UserVoice provides hosted feedback forums, which allow customers to create, discuss, share stories and guidance, and vote for ideas. They do this by providing support systems, which allow you to answer your customers’ questions quicker and with less effort. UserVoice continually builds tools with the goal of customer understanding, not deflection, in mind. They do this by listening to their own customers constantly and carefully, to find out what they need.

fnMentoring is on Wednesday, January 23rd 2013, beginning at 10:30 am. RSVP to participate in this event.

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