Maven Consultations by the Numbers

Here at Maven World Headquarters we recently spent a foggy San Francisco Saturday (of which there are no shortage) looking back at the first half of 2010 and reflecting on how much Maven has grown and evolved since we officially “launched.” As part of our effort to learn more about our Global Knowledge Marketplace, we pulled some data from the system about our Telephone Consultation product. Specifically, we wanted to find out how long a “typical” Consultation lasts, the overall range and distribution of Consultation times, and a bit about the behavior of our participants.

We thought the results were interesting and decided to share them with you:

• The “average” (mean) Consultation time is 33 minutes. Surprisingly, the median time is 30 minutes. We figured that the median would be more like 25 minutes, but we were mistaken. Here’s a look at the distribution of Consultation times:

Looks pretty “normal,” eh?

• The shortest Consultation ever was less than 4 minutes (though in keeping with our payment policies, the Member was paid for 10 minutes of their time). Interestingly, the Client who requested the Consultation provided positive feedback; in other words, just because a Consultation is short doesn’t mean it’s bad.
• The longest continuous Consultation ever was just shy of 2 hours. It is more common for users to conduct several short Consultations than a few long ones. (NOTE TO CLIENTS: this means that anybody trying to charge you “per discussion” or in flat one-hour increments is ripping you off!)
• Follow-up Consultations are very common: over 20% of the total Consultations that take place in Maven involve the Client requesting to speak with a Member with whom they have consulted before.
• The No-Show Rate is higher among Members than Clients. This result surprised us. We thought that the people being paid would be more motivated to pick up the phone at the scheduled time than the people paying for the Consultation. It turns out it’s the other way around.
• Thursday is the most common day of the week for Consultations, followed by Monday and Wednesday.

We’ll continue to post more interesting stats as we generate them. As always, please contact us if you have any questions or comments.