Just the FAQs

Brandweek, Oct 30, 2000 by Janis Mara

Louise Kirkbride's Broad Daylight answers questions you never even thought of, but will wish you had.

You don't have to tell Louise Kirkbride. CEO of Broad Daylight, that the Internet isn't exactly rocket science. Kirkbride entered her alma mater, Caltech, as an astrophysics major in the school's first undergraduate class to accept women. "When I saw the moon landing in 1969, it was obvious-I wanted to be an astronaut," says Kirkbride. Though her interest in space has persisted while at Caltech Kirkbride became enamored of logic design and changed her major to electrical engineering. After graduation, she continued to be a pioneer, helming a total of three high-tech firms, the most recent of which is Santa Clara, Calif.-based Broad Daylight.

"Our technology streamlines the frequently asked question process for business," says Kirkbride "We seed the FAQ areas of the site with common questions and answers the company has already documented. Every time a new question is submitted, the instant the answer person hits 'send' to deliver the reply, the question and answer go up on the Web site."

The idea is that if one person has a question, it's likely that others will ask the same thing. According to Kirkbride, "we have sites where answers have been delivered 50 to 100,000 times."

The Broad Daylight system capitalizes on the interactive component of the Web to save clients money, Kirkbride claims. "It costs about $33 in overhead such as air conditioning, salary and phone bills for a developer to take a phone call and about $10 to answer via e-mail. It's only about $1 for self-service if the content is there on the site."

Broad Daylight's clients include American Airlines, O'Reilly & Associates, Raychem, Garage.com, Working Woman magazine and SPACE.com, an educational and news site dedicated to the subject of space. Broad Daylight set up a Q&A section for spacekids, the children's section of SPACE.com, when astronaut Sally Ride was president of the site (Ride has since stepped down), a job Kirkbride says "was a dream come true."

During the Presidential primaries, Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, used Broad Day-light on his Web site. "After McCain won the New Hampshire primary, traffic to his site skyrocketed, but the number of e-mails stayed level because there were already answers to the most common questions up on the site-abortion, gays in the military, his POW experiences in Vietnam," says Kirkbride.

Before launching Broad Daylight, Kirkbride was founder and CEO of Answer Systems, which provided software for help desk staffers. In 1996, she sold the company to Chicago-based Platinum Technology (since acquired by Computer Associates) for $40 million. Prior to Answer Systems, Kirkbride founded a high-tech company with her husband Richard Lipes, an engineer. And before this venture, she worked at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena. During that time, Kirkbride was chosen as a finalist in a civilian astronaut program.

Of her most recent enterprise, Kirkbride notes, "Other technologies have made it easy to buy things. We make it easy to answer questions. It's an important service because the Web has made it easier to ask questions, but harder to get answers."