Billable consultants: 90
Offices: 1
"We are a technology consulting firm that helps companies increase revenue or reduce costs with an Internet flair," says Folz, the CEO of Molecular, Inc.
Founded in 1994 (as Tvisions, an e-commerce pioneer), the privately held company has an expertise that centers on points where technology meets customer experience. For example, Molecular recently created — and trademarked — "Single-Screen Checkout," an interface that helps prevent online shoppers from abandoning their shopping carts before entering their payment information and clicking the "Buy" button.
Retailers, who along with healthcare represent the two industries Molecular most frequently services, suffer greatly from online checkout abandonment: Electronic consumers currently walk away from more than half of all electronic shopping carts before finalizing a purchase.
Molecular's solution enables online consumers to use one checkout form, on one screen, rather than click repeatedly back and forth between online catalog pages and their shopping list to determine, among other things, how much money they're spending, how much shipping and handling costs will be, and what their sales tax amounts to.
The solution illustrates how the firm combines industry (retail, in this case) know-how with user-experience savvy (the firm understood that most online checkout processes require far too much form-filling) and the deep technology skills necessary to integrate the customer interface with its retail clients' back-end order and accounting systems.
Its post-dotcom-bubble embrace of Internet technologies differentiates Molecular from other firms, but the firm's overall approach to consulting also seems unique. Unlike those of other technology consulting firms, Molecular's offerings do not fit into neat packages such as CRM, ERP, or BPM — yet they make a lot of sense, even to nontechies.
"It recently struck me how few consulting firms focus on user experience or customer-centric design or even think about it," says Folz. "Traditional IT consulting firms are about big, multimillion-dollar IT projects, packaged implementations. They are not about working with a company to understand who their customers are and what those customers want, and then designing a system from the outside in."
Folz comes across not as a technologist who gets caught up in the technology, but rather as one who gets a kick out of the way technology can be applied to improve the customer experience. Like every other technology consultancy, Molecular suffered in the wake of the dotcom bust, but not terribly so. The firm endured two unprofitable years, partly by choice because it chose to remain relatively overinvested in sales in preparation for the economic turnaround.
Folz says that one secret of success is being a private company, a quality that enabled Molecular to invest in long-term growth in 2002 without incurring the wrath of shareholders. Another reason is the firm's ability to ask essential, commonsense questions about its clients' customers: Why is the online checkout process such a hassle? Why can't I order a new flat-screen TV online and then pick it up at the retailer's electronics superstore around the corner?
Perhaps the best reason for Molecular's success is the way that it applies technology to answering those questions. "I'm as passionate and bullish about the Internet as I've ever been," Folz adds. "It's real, and so are the projects we do. Our shopping project [Single-Screen Checkout] has increased our customers' conversion rates by 50 percent."
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