CIO

AskNicely gets $6.7M funding and launches world-first mobile platform

Kiwi software uses real-time customer feedback to fuel business growth

The ability to intercept a negative experience, or celebrate positive ones, is transformational for our clients and is now made even more accessible on our mobile app

Aaron Ward, AskNicely

AskNicely, the customer feedback software company, has announced a $6.7million strategic capital raise led by Blackbird Ventures. 

 The financing coincides with the launch of AskNicely for iPhone, which it says is the world’s first SaaS mobile app to enable staff to monitor and act on NPS, at any time, from anywhere.

 “Great businesses are built on repeat, happy customers yet many businesses have no idea whether customers are actually happy until it’s too late.” says Aaron Ward, AskNicely co-founder and CEO. 

“Our mission is to help businesses grow faster by acting on customer feedback to increase customer loyalty, spend and referrals.  Now, with our new mobile app, it’s incredibly easy incorporate real time feedback into the daily routine for everyone from the CEO to front line staff.

“The ability to intercept a negative experience, or celebrate positive ones, is transformational for our clients and is now made even more accessible on our mobile app. Between meetings, on the train to work, in fact whenever you want, we are the only NPS SaaS product to offer live updates from your customers with the opportunity to respond personally, all at your fingertips,” says Ward, in a statement.

AskNicely provides customer feedback platform that uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) framework to help businesses increase customer retention, spend, and referrals.  

Feedback from customers is collected and analysed in real-time, providing the ability for staff to respond to customers immediately. Designed to integrate seamlessly into dozens of different SaaS tools including Salesforce.com, AskNicely says it sends over one million surveys each week globally, with a response rate that’s up to 10 times higher than conventional surveys.

NPS is widely regarded as the gold standard as a means to measure of customer satisfaction, used heavily across service industries in particular.

 Inspired by the practices of customer-centric heavyweights like Uber, AirBnB and Amazon, New Zealanders Ward and John Ballinger set out in 2014 to create a simple, lightweight method of collecting feedback that integrates directly into the world’s most popular SaaS platforms including Salesforce, Slack, Intercom, HubSpot, Zendesk, Shopify and dozens more.

Over the past year, AskNicely says it has increased annual revenue by 350 per cent. It has opened new offices in Portland, Oregon as well as Auckland, New Zealand, and grown to a team of 20. 

 It has consistently been the highest rated enterprise feedback software according to G2 Crowd with current customers including Jetstar Airways, Xero, Deliveroo, Seagate and the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.

The app has been one of the most exciting additions to our customer toolkit this year, enabling me to put travel time to good use checking in on what our customers are saying and engaging with them directly from my phone.

Cath Stone, Jetstar

CX feedback

By collecting post-flight feedback,  Jetstar is able to deliver real-time NPS and feedback onto live dashboards across the business and respond directly to customers as issues are raised.

 Everyone from frontline crew and call centre teams through to the head office support and executive teams now has direct line of sight to what customers are saying about their experience. 

 “The AskNicely app has been one of the most exciting additions to our customer toolkit this year, enabling me to put travel time to good use checking in on what our customers are saying and engaging with them directly from my phone," says Cath Stone, head of customer strategy at Jetstar.

“In each of our prior investments, NPS has been the truth serum that reveals the quality of a business and predicts their future success. But far too many companies just measure and don’t act. We’re thrilled to join AskNicely to help more of the world’s companies become customer obsessed,” says Blackbird co-founder Niki Scevak, who is also joining the board.

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