Vol. 2, No. 1
January-March 2013
www.QuiBids.com
QuiBids Quarterly QUIBIDS PARTNERS WITH PROS FOR AFRICA
PHOTO BY ERIK GAUSE
Oklahoma City Thunder power forward Serge Ibaka poses for a photo with Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe at a February fundraiser QuiBids sponsored on behalf of Pros for Africa, an Oklahoma City-based nonprofit that contributes to the Saint Monica Girls Schools in Uganda. Read more on page four.
A department built from scratch
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hese days when you walk the roundabout hallway in QuiBids’ Oklahoma City office you will pass a room that seems too large to be occupying the sixteenth story of an office building. Its glass wall affords passersby a look inside where about a dozen desks sit, each outfitted with a pair of Dell monitors, comfortable headsets and cushy, black rolling chairs of the type preferred by computer gamers. About half are occupied at any given time due to the alternating day and night
staffers, each of which types with a speed that makes you wonder if their employers are counting keystrokes. Next door and then again in a third office down the hall more employees are talking into similar headsets, at least one or two in each office always assuring customers that their order is en route or explaining how the auction process works. This is a far cry from November 2009, when QuiBids’ Customer Support “department” consisted of a page on the site that listed a lone email address and a single em-
ployee monitoring it, Josh Walker. “It wasn’t too sophisticated,” said Walker, 30, QuiBids’ sixth employee. Now the director of QuiBids’ Customer Support department, Walker oversees about 25 people who often handle thousands of help requests a day. “Matt [Beckham, QuiBids’ CEO and co-founder] and the other executives dealt with customers for about a month before throwing up their hands and deciding they needed to Built from scratch continues on page 2
What’s new with us? Read about our latest site features on page 6
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January-March 2013
Josh Walker, QuiBids Customer Support Director
January-March 2013
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How QuiBids differs from eBay Though QuiBids and eBay are both auctions websites and are often compared on that premise, their differences are distinct. In order to understand how QuiBids works and its value in the marketplace, it is important to bear these fundamental differences in mind.
New, factory-sealed products Unlike eBay, which deals in a lot of secondhand and older editions of products, everything on QuiBids is new and backed by a return policy in the case that it turns out to be defective or damaged during shipment.
QuiBids auctions are pay-to-play On QuiBids, customers must buy bids by the bundle in order to participate in auctions. This is a stark difference to eBay, where only the bidder who bid highest actually spends any money.
No minimum ending price On eBay, there’s often a minimum price required for the item to sell. In other words, it’s a guarantee that the independent seller hosting the auction on eBay will make some amount of money.
On QuiBids, all items are guaranteed to sell once they’re on the site. That means customers can walk away with a brandnew product worth a couple hundred bucks just for spending one timely bid. More than just auctions A whole section of QuiBids is devoted to games that earn customers free bids. Customers are also awarded badges for their progress on the site, and now they can also purchase products at retail pricing in the QuiBids Store, and receive free bids with each purchase.
Built from scratch Continued from page 2 PHOTO BY ERIK GAUSE
Built from scratch Continued from page 1
dedicate a full-time person to it. The volume just grew like crazy from there.” QuiBids’ executive leadership quickly realized that they had underestimated the demand for the service they offered, but there were more reasons for the dramatic spike in questions and requests for help from customers. “We all understood the auction model because it was, well, our livelihood,” said Jeff Geurts, QuiBids’ chief financial officer. “But the public was so used to the way eBay worked that we realized we would have to do a lot of one-on-one teaching to acclimate everyone to our auction format —which is very different from eBay’s— if we wanted to retain customers for the long haul.” Since Walker joined the company,
QuiBids used a software suite developed by fellow startup Zendesk as the infrastructure for its employees’ multi-channel dealings with customers. It creates tickets whenever a customer enters into one of these channels by sending an email or Facebook message, requesting a live chat, or calling up the QuiBids Customer Support hotline, among other actions. Algorithmic triggers evaluate each inquiry for keywords as it arrives, automatically assigning the ticket to the proper employee. It’s much like a digital traffic controller, saving hours of work in manual ticket assignment by quickly shepherding each question, concern, and request for help to the employee best suited to help. With the fast pace of QuiBids auctions comes the need to address customers’ issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. “A big segment of
our customers spend time on QuiBids because it’s exciting and entertaining,” said Geurts. “And if they can’t figure out how some part of the site works, it becomes less entertaining quickly. So we invested heavily into opening up channels for customers to get individualized help and attention from well-trained employees who have the time to assist them.” “We expanded from email to incorporate phone support and live chat and were up to about 15 employees at one year in,” Walker said. “We also share stewardship duties of QuiBids’ social media accounts with our public relations department so that we can help customers who prefer talking to us there.” According to Sam Boonin, Zendesk’s vice president of products, Built from scratch continues on page 3
QuiBids Customer Support by the numbers
the benchmark average first-response time in the retail industry is 26.4 hours. “It’s a mean across all tickets How often, in minutes, that QuiBids Cusyou respond to in a given month,” The retail industry’s average first-response tomer Support receives a ticket, all day, time, in hours, according to Zendesk. Boonin said of the statistic. “We find every day, 365 days a year. that response time is highly correlated to satisfaction; the faster you respond to your customer’s requests, QuiBids Customer Support’s average firstThe percent of QuiBids Customer Support the higher your satisfaction is likely response time, in hours. In other words tickets resolved at first response, often this is how long it takes on average for to be.” with a single email. a Customer Support employee to first QuiBids’ average first-response respond to a customer’s issue. time, according to a November case study conducted by Zendesk, is 14.9 The average increase in tickets between a hours, nearly half a day faster than Source: Zendesk case study typical day and one in the holiday season. the rest of the industry. Walker attributes that speed to the width of channels open to customers and the company’s investment in its support department. and filter common, easy-to-solve issues out from bigger, “I like to think that’s about as fast as we can get without more specialized ones,” Walker said. sacrificing the quality of the help we provide,” Walker He went on to say that he instructs his employees to said. The enormity of channels may seem like overkill, value educating customers over the letter-of-the-law enbut when you see an average of nearly 20,000 tickets per forcement of QuiBids’ policies. “If we think helping cusmonth (and sometimes as many as 1,500 in a single day tomers out in a small way will encourage them to return to during the Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s holiday season) the site in the future by, say, allowing them to complete a it helps to keep the channels less clogged with traffic. SeaBuy Now several hours after the fact, we’ll definitely do it. sonal help is usually hired. Studies show that a strong customer service experience is “We want to be able to work with customers on a casea huge factor in bringing customers back to any business, by-case basis, so we’ve used Zendesk to quickly identify and we’ve seen that to be true here.”
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QuiBids in the Community
Pros for Africa
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PHOTOS BY ERIK GAUSE
QuiBids Chief Financial Officer Jeff Geurts addresses the crowd during the Pros for Africa fundraiser Jan. 30.
ros for Africa is an Oklahoma City-based nonprofit that regularly sends volunteers and medical aid to help the Saint Monica Girls Schools in Uganda and Sudan, and other parts of Africa that have been torn apart by war. QuiBids sponsored a fundraiser for Pros for Africa in February, and met Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, an amazing woman who is helping to heal physical and emotional wounds by teaching girls practical skills like farming and sewing. Even among professional basketball players, Sister Rosemary was the star. Thunder star Kevin Durant showed up midway through the dinner to join his teammate Serge Ibaka, yielding a round of applause from the crowd.
QuiBids Compliance Director Landon Martin — who is normally pretty tall — poses for a photo with 6’7” Thunder starter Thabo Sefolosha.
January-March 2013
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Cans lined the halls outside of QuiBids’ business development offices for several weeks. That department combined with merchandising to bring 1,016 items of food.
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Employees unload a round of food at the reception center of the Oklahoma Regional Food Bank. It took four trucks or SUVs to get it all from the office to the Bank.
PHOTOS BY MATT CARNEY
Several QuiBids employees load a truck with donated food on one of several trips made from the office to the parking lot.
Feeding the hungry
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competition between departments in the QuiBids offices in December collected exactly 3,838 pounds of food, which was subsequently donated to the Oklahoma Regional Food Bank. It took four trucks and SUVs (one even made two trips) and a whole
morning of loading and unloading to get all those canned vegetables, Jell-O boxes, macaroni packages and soup cans from the office to the Food Bank’s collection center in southwest Oklahoma City. Measured by FDA standards, that donation provided 3,198 meals for Food Bank clients this winter.
The food waits at the Regional Food Bank to be organized and distributed to Oklahomans.
PLACE POSTAGE HERE
4 NE 10th St., Ste. 242 Oklahoma City, OK 73104
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January-March 2013
What is new with QuiBids?
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nnovation and im- our roster of merchandise provement have been suppliers and streamlining part of the our own order fabric of QuiBids fulfillment prosince we built the cesses we have site in 2009, stabeen able to wranbilizing the religle our shipping ability of our paycosts down to to-play auction where we can abmodel with a form sorb all domestic of buyer protecshipping. It was, tion called Buy unsurprisingly, MATT Now. Those goals an overwhelming BECKHAM to innovate and favorite improveimprove remain ment among cusas important to us as ever, tomers in the United States. so we have added some new site features recently. QuiBids Reviews With more products Free U.S. shipping comes the need for customBy working closely with ers to quickly compare their
options, so we set up a section for them to offer their thoughts on the products they win. Customers can see ratings, read full reviews and even use these features to browse for products. QuiBids Store in Canada When we opened QuiBids’ online storefront in November it was only available to U.S. customers. A complement to our auctions, QuiBids Store offers all our products to be purchased at their Buy Now price anytime, and with each purchase comes an incentive: a specified amount of Voucher Bids that get credited directly to
Get in touch with QuiBids! www.QuiBids.com (405) 253-3883 4 NE 10th St., Ste. 242 Oklahoma City, OK 73104 Jill Farrand Public Relations Director jfarrand@quibids.com
the customer’s account. The Store’s now open in Canada, and we aim to do the same for Australia in 2013.