Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Peter U. Leppik, CEO and co-founder of Vocal Laboratories Inc.

VocaLabs measures the quality and performance of companies' customer service. How did you get into that business?
My career path hasn't been a straight one, that's for sure! I started out thinking I was going to go into physics, but after earning a Master's, I realized that academia wasn't for me. I had been doing my research at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA ), literally just a year and a floor removed from where Marc Andreessen wrote Mosaic, the original graphical web browser. In 1996, when I decided to leave graduate school, the Internet was just hitting popular awareness. Being someone very familiar with Internet technology, I went to an investment bank, Wessels, Arnold & Henderson, and joined a group of research analysts following companies building communications hardware.

Over time, I carved out a specialty in companies which make call center technology. This is pretty cool stuff. Most people don't realize the amount of hardware and software which large companies deploy to make sure their 1-800 numbers get answered. There's software to route calls to the right person across a dozen different call centers; hardware to manage call queues; systems to make sure information about your call gets transferred when you do. And that's not even getting into the stuff most people actually see, like the speech recognition systems, and the automated self-service.

But as I was really grokking all this technology, I also realized that there was a business problem: customers weren't any happier despite the technology and money being deployed to serve them. The problem wasn't that the technology was no good, it was that companies didn't know how to use it properly, and they didn't have a good way to figure out whether a piece of technology would help or hurt.

In 2001, I decided to leave the investment banking world after living through my second merger. Wessels, Arnold & Henderson had long since ceased to exist, and we were now a teeny part of some huge Canadian bank which didn't care about us. That, and the market was tanking, and I really didn't want to put up with what I knew I would have to put up with to avoid being laid off.

So, after I left, I decided to take a crack at solving the problem of bad customer service. What we've developed at VocaLabs is a unique measurement method which allows us to quantify how good a company's customer service is; predict how good (or bad) it will be if they deploy a new piece of technology; and compare different customer service operations so we can benchmark and do competitive analysis. This is all based on data from real people, not the "analysis" of an "expert" or the hypothetical results from a simulation.

So how's business?
I'm glad to say that things are really picking up. We're not profitable yet, but I hope to be soon.

What have the challenges been?
Our biggest challenge, really, has been raising awareness. The call center market is unbelievably fragmented, even though something like $150 billion is spent every year on customer service. So, there's no one channel we can go through to reach all those operations. Also, because nobody's ever tackled the problem of predicting customer satisfaction and service performance before, a lot of call center managers don't even realize that what we do can be done.

But the people we really want to reach are in the marketing and advertising communities. Consumer-oriented companies spend billions trying to attract new customers, but then they don't pay any attention to what happens when those customers pick up the phone. Customer service is really a marketing problem. because it is all about how your customers perceive you. That's the message we want to get across.

Other than VocaLabs, what keeps you busy?
My family, more than anything else. I have three amazing sons, John (age 5), Steve (2), and Nick (2). Steve and Nick are identical twins. My wife, Carla, has been the anchor of my world since we met 14 years ago.

I also spend a lot of time writing, of course. I'm involved very heavily with the Minnesota Children's Museum , where I serve on the board of directors; and the Science Museum of Minnesota , where I volunteer. Carla and I are also both licensed pilots, though as you can probably imagine, we don't get as much time to fly as we'd like these days.

What made you want to start a blog?
I've always expressed my creative side through writing. In graduate school, I wrote fiction. In the investment banking world, I wrote research reports, which wasn't all that different. At VocaLabs, I get to do some writing, but I found I had a lot of things I wanted to write about which didn't fit with what we needed as a company.

So, I started writing a blog. I like to say that this is the place I put the ideas which leak from my brain.

Where do you find the time?
It isn't easy! Sometimes, I write over lunch from my office. Sometimes, I write at home after the kids are in bed. Fortunately, I've always been a very fast writer, and I find I can usually put down fully-formed ideas almost as fast as I can type.

Why did you decide to blog pseudonymously?
When I first set up my weblog, I saw a lot of other blogs where people did kind of dumb things. Like write about their secret love affairs and sign their real names. Even though I've never had any secret love affairs (my life isn't anywhere near that interesting), I figured I might write about personal issues, or confidential business stuff, and I didn't want anyone to know my deepest darkest secrets through a Google search.

Well, [laughs] a funny thing happened! It turns out I don't really have any deep dark secrets. Or at least, I don't write about them. All my family, friends, and employees know about my blog, and this has kept me from writing anything really scandalous. Besides, anyone with the sense to do a whois search knows who I am anyway.

I mean, let's face it, I'm not Belle de Jour . I'm not Belle de Anything .

So why come out of the closet now?
A couple reasons. The big one is, I'd like more freedom to write about business issues which specifically affect VocaLabs and my industry without worrying about "blowing my cover." That and nobody was doing me the honor of trying to figure out who Shivering Timbers really is, so there wasn't much fun in it any more.

But I'll still write under my pseudonym, I just won't go to any effort to hide it. Writing under a pseudonym gives me some distance from my professional life. I can write about politics or philosophy without someone thinking that I'm speaking for VocaLabs. I've found that when you're CEO, and especially founder/CEO, you're always speaking for your company. This way, I can just speak for myself.

One final question: Don't you think it's a little, well, conceited, to interview yourself in your own weblog?
[laughs] I prefer to think of it as a literary device.

No, really. I think you can get away with almost anything as long as you approach it with a sense of humor.