Wootric raises $2.6M to boost customer happiness

Wootric is a Net Promoter Score platform that lets businesses get more accurate customer feedback

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Back when I was in high school I started doing jobs where I had to serve other people, mostly involving food. The one thing that I realized very quickly is that the phrase "the customer is always right," is absolutely not true. Not at all. That is not to say that customer happiness is not important, though. In fact, it is pretty much the key to success in business. 

That's what many companies are finding out now that the relationship that they have with their customers is closer than ever, thanks to the time they spend on Web and mobile apps. Customer service now has to be on 24/7.

That is where Wootric comes in. A company that has an in-application Net Promoter Score (NPS) platform for boosting customer happiness, it announced on Tuesday that it is has raised an oversubscribed $2.6 million Series A round of funding.

The round was led by Cloud Apps Capital Partners, with additional participation by CSC Upshot.

Founded in 2014, Wootric is solution that makes Net Promoter program management easy by removing the manual and resource-intensive elements from Net Promoter implementation and tracking. That frees up time for the business to then focus on the customer instead.

"As companies have realized that customer experience is the only true advantage, executives are focusing on Net Promoter Score, the leading customer experience metric. Wootric is the only NPS solution that goes beyond measurement to provide the workflows and analytics required for companies to align the entire company around improving customer experience," Deepa Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Wootric, told me.

Traditionally, NPS has been managed via email surveys which often suffer from poor response rates, she said, but Wootric has an "always on in-app approach" which replaces the "cumbersome, manual process of setting up email survey campaigns and compiling potentially stale feedback."

"Our high response rates mean our customers are hearing from more of their customers. We also make it easy to route the feedback to the right stakeholder for followup with the customer," she said.

Wootric also differentiates itself from its competitors by "helping to shift the focus from measurement to aligning everyone in the company around boosting Net Promoter Score," Subramanian told me, noting that others in the space either require lengthy, and expensive, installations, or are simple survey tools that lack analytics and workflow.

"The customer experience management space is fragmented and doesn't contain a clear category leader. The turnkey nature of our platform, which is five minute install, business freemium model, and cross-functional approach best position us to take the lead," she said.

The typical Wootric customers are SaaS companies such as New Relic or Citrix, and e-commerce companies. They use it to automate Net Promoter score surveys of customers in their Web and mobile products so that they can glean insights about customer issues, and also trigger followup workflow to close the loop with their customers.

The company has over 100 customers, with half of that customer base outside the U.S. It has survey respondents in every online country around the world, 195 countries altogether, excluding only North Korea. It currently surveys over 2 million users a month and growing.

"Without a solution to align the company around customer happiness, companies are faced with low customer loyalty and satisfaction. Our customers are able to A/B happiness test product features, identify promoters for advocate marketing, reduce churn, and ultimately increase customer loyalty by using Wootric," said Subramanian.

The funding will be used to continue to build out its team, which currently consists of eight employees, by hiring in product, sales, and success, including a few key executives in each department.

 It will also be used to extend the product roadmap.

"Our product roadmap is structured around the ideal workflow for unifying teams around the customer: Ask your customers, analyze their feedback, route to right team, and help you take followup action," Subramanian told me.

The plan is to go deeper into each bucket, channel expansion under "ask" for example, and to automate more of the manual aspects of the workflow, for example text or sentiment analysis.

In addition to the funding, it was announced that Matt Holleran and Judy Loehr,  of Cloud Apps Capital Partners, have both joined the board of directors at Wootric. 

"Matt and Judy are experienced SaaS investors with a particular focus on cloud business freemium companies like us. They help us think about our go-to-market and sales approaches and to hire great team members," said Subramanian.

“In today's market, customer experience is a top CEO priority and more executives are turning to the Net Promoter Score as the most important CEO metric to guide their comprehensive customer experience strategy," Holleran told me in an emailed statement.

“Wootric is the only NPS solution that goes beyond measurement to provide the workflows and analytics required for companies to make a positive impact on their customer experience, and we believe Deepa and Jessica have created the right foundation, with the right business model, for a customer experience solution that can help companies globally."

Over the next five years, the San Francisco-based Wootric has plans to emerge as the leader in the customer experience management space, to be "the platform of choice for companies the world over looking for a solution to unify their teams around improving customer experience."