Kathy Englar invited me to meet with some of ActiveBuddy's sales and marketing team yesterday, briefly, on my short trip to the Bay Area (attending the OracleWorld conference, about which more later).

I had a chance to meet Kerry Christensen, the VP of Sales, who has been with the company only a few months, but seems to have a really good feel for what's involved in enterprise sales based on his 15+ years in the EDI software space and his more recent tour of duty with Liberate (Larry Ellison's foray into the world of cable).

ActiveBuddy seems to be continuing on with a very determined sales campaign, and have some new high visibility customers. As just one example, Comcast has rolled out a self-help customer support bot on their website, called AskComcast. As a Comcast customer, I can attest to the horrible customer support that Comcast has offered in the past. I played with the bot, and got some relatively good responses to simple issues, like configuring my email client. I can see how this will offload customer support reps from the mundane and leave them more time to deal with larger problems (like my aggreived call last week, when I discovered Comcast has installed a new email management program that limited me to no more than 20 outbound emails/hour, without informing me).

Kerry also mentioned that Verizon will be rolling out an ActiveBuddy solution for self-help customer support (as well as several internal, undisclosed projects).

Looks like ActiveBuddy is riding the self-help customer support wave, and hard. Companies are looking to cut costs, and it is an interesting paradox (to paraphrase Larry Ellison) you may need to be willing to spend less to offer better customer support.