Solvate: New New York City Business

Julie Ruvolo, who pops up everywhere on the digital scene all at the same time, has joined a startup that went alpha this month. www.solvate.com

The concept revolves around creating an uber-database covering answers to common customer service issues that people individually need to solve hundreds of times each day. Solvate allows frustrated customers to not have to re-invent the wheel each time one of us has a problem someone else had before. For example, something like “How can I return my cable box back to Time Warner so I can cancel my cable subscription” probably takes us 45 minutes working through TWC’s byzantine call centers before we find out our options. And even then, we probably only find the option that one customer service rep knows, which I bet would be a different option if we were connected to another rep on another day. Meanwhile, I know hundreds of other people had to have gone through this…why don’t I know what they know?

Solvate plans to standardize the ‘answers’ to these questions, so that Solvate agents (and I assume the online public) can provide fast solutions to the second client who asks the same question.

Solvate charges by the man-hour to find the solution, and is currently offering your first hour of agent time for free. So, I tried it out by asking about the best online site to find a deal for a Disney Cruise. I know that Disney itself doesn’t offer many deals directly to cruisers, but they do offer them to agents (who then can pass on the deals to cruisers). Solvate did work, I did get a list of places from “Ryan C”, my Solvate agent, that offered consistent specials and weren’t shaky fly-by-night travel sites. I’m not sure if it saved me time, since it was just an online search. But, I would guess that if my problem involved customer service reps, and phone calls, and escalations, and specific departments, Solvate would save me time and aggravation. And if I was the lucky second person that asked a question, I am sure that the pain of the first person would benefit me. I think the trick for Solvate is to hone in on the problems people would be willing to pay Solvate to solve. ate.

Good luck, Julie and Solvate. I’ll call you back when I need to cancel my cable subscription so I can get FiOS.