Jorsek: Managing 21st Century Knowledge

Pia Sawhney, ASV’s Director of Strategy, spoke with Patrick Bosek, CEO of Jorsek, about the company and its approach to knowledge management through its leading B2B software platform. An edited version of their conversation appears below.

PS: What is Jorsek, what does the company do and who are the customers?

PB: Jorsek is a company that focuses on knowledge content. We have a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. That application makes the process of creating knowledge content much faster, much more maintainable, much more scalable, and much easier to deliver to your customer across the touchpoints that they have.

So, when you’re going to buy something that’s sufficiently complicated.. We build a tool for people who build tools not toys. So, it’s really B2B, that’s our customers. When you’re going through a process of deciding whether to buy from that company or if you’re a customer and you’re at a point when you’re deciding whether to recommend that company? Along that way, customers are going to have dozens of educational touch points with you. Some of those are in the very beginning, with very light marketing content. That’s not so much us.

But very quickly it gets to things where you’re looking at documentation to ensure that it works the way you want it to; you’re trying the software or product in the way that you’re integrating it into your process and you may have other forms of reference materials that are involved. You’re working with your support people in order to try different things, get answers, solve problems those support people rely on. The latest up-to-date knowledge information. When you become a new customer, there’s an onboarding process. It’s an educational process, where you’re taking the process of learning about the product, how to use it, how to integrate it. Then, there’s other learning touch points, and there’s reference materials after that.

Then you also have micro-content that will also be embedded in products, talk-through chatbots and things like that, as you’re using smaller pieces of it and becoming an expert in it.

So, all of that content, all of that knowledge content, can be written in our software, and point to each one of those things simultaneously, and from the same source. You don’t rewrite any of that stuff.

PS: How did you arrive at a place where you thought, ‘Well, it’s a good time for me now to seek venture capital?’ Was that something that somebody suggested to you or was it something that you did some research on, did you feel the company was going in a direction you felt warranted additional attention from a VC? How did you come to that decision?

PB: I think it was a combination of factors. One of them was the company. It had reached a point of maturity, in both product and organization, that we felt it was ready for institutional capital. We thought that we were in a good place, we were profitable, we were above that size margin where people get freaked out about companies that are not in the major hubs. So, we had some proof points.

But, I think there was also a major change happening in the world that was the stage for this whole thing. You see that customer experience is becoming a really big thing that people are focused on, as they should be. The problem is that people are thinking of customer experience as, ‘How do I get a bunch of analytics and then have somebody reach out to that person?’

But the problem is that stuff is not scalable. The way that people need to look at customer experience is by breaking it down a little bit more. One of the pillars of customer experience is the educational knowledge piece. And people are not focused enough on that chunk. We started seeing organizations getting to a point where they were realizing that was competitive.

So, go and look at any enterprise software company on their front pages, they say the same things as their competitors, all of them. They all say the exact same stuff. You have got to read deep to realize whether one of them is different and where they are different.

Where we start to touch the customer is where it’s starting to matter.

No longer are we in a world where you can just have a better product, because everyone’s product is pretty good today. No longer are we in a world can you say, ‘We’re the best,’ because everybody says the same thing. Now, you have to be able to start to create intelligent materials that speak to your customer around their problems and solutions, that are going to be a little bit meatier, a little bit more in-depth, those types of things. And that’s becoming a really important part of the customer experience.

PS: It sounds like what you’re saying is it’s helping the customer get a better sense of the product, understand the features of the product a little better, understand the uses of the product a little deeper. Essentially what you’re saying is that the better they can do that, the better the product can become too, presumably.

PB: Absolutely.

PS: If the customer does not really understand what the utility or functionalities are, it’s very difficult for them to say, well, I just bought this amazing enterprise platform because what’s in the platform? I have no idea. And so, you need to be able to go someplace to figure that out, in a seamless, easy, relatively straightforward manner.

PB: The reality is you can’t go someplace, you go many places. One of the major issues you see in almost all companies is that the answer is a little different everyplace. And that does not reinforce somebody’s understanding. What this is all really about is it’s about creating a higher level of understanding of the capabilities and how to execute on those for your customer, because customers don’t use parts of your product they don’t understand. And when they don’t use your entire product, they aren’t as valuable as customers because they are not getting value out of your product.

So, you have to be consistent in every place they go. It could be their cell phone, it could be their support site, it could be the chatbot on your website, it could be the context, it could be the learning site they take to onboard onto your system. Every touch point has to be high quality.

So, we document our software because our software is a B2B enterprise system. So, it’s the perfect use case for our system is to document our system in it. And, of course, we do. And frankly, we don’t sell to companies our size, something I always think is really ironic about being an enterprise startup. Like you are way too small to buy your own product. But I cannot imagine having to deal with the type of knowledge delivery that we do in another application. We couldn’t do it. There’s no way we could do it. If we could do it, our support costs would just be so much higher than they are now. I don’t know how we’d function.

PS: So, you’re saying that because you incubated this product and you can use it for your own company, that it’s giving you some mileage?

PB: Absolutely. Our product is a core component of how we’re successful as a company. We run all of our knowledge materials through our product. All of our policies or procedures as well. We are a relatively small team. We are a startup. Our ability to punch above our weight, in terms of the amount of knowledge that we deploy out toward our customers, and how much that system reduces our overall cost from a support perspective, is massive. It’s the reason we’re able to do our jobs in so many ways.