AskNicely, a provider of customer experience software for service businesses, announced that it has completed a $32M Series B funding round and is launching the world’s first Frontline Success Platform.
The round was led by Five Elms Capital with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Blackbird. As part of the funding, Ryan Mandl from Five Elms will join the AskNicely board.
The funding will help AskNicely lead the next generation of customer experience software for service businesses, bringing better technology to frontline teams. According to CEO, Aaron Ward, “Traditional customer experience software solutions do an ok job keeping analysts busy with mountains of data, but they totally ignore the actual people responsible for serving the customer. It’s kind of outrageous that the class of workers that’s most impactful on the customer experience is also the most under-served, underpaid, and under-appreciated. We’ve designed AskNicely for the frontline worker and made it our mission to make frontline work awesome.”
The new Frontline Success platform takes inspiration from some of the world’s leading people-powered businesses who’ve invested in technology to coach and motivate millions of frontline workers with no requirement for supervision or layers of traditional management. “Brands like Uber and Airbnb have proven how customer feedback can be gamified for customer-facing staff to unlock small daily improvements which, over time, drive status and rewards with concepts like ‘Superhost’ or ‘Uber Platinum Pro’. For the first time, any service business can now empower every frontline worker with the same capability in a simple mobile app at a fraction of the cost,” explains Ward.
The benefits to early customers have been significant. Ward reports, “We’ve had clients report NPS results doubling and multi-million dollar sales and marketing cost savings from increased repeat purchases and referrals.”
“Service businesses are experiencing increasingly high levels of competition for both customers and employees as customer loyalty has declined and labor shortages persist post-COVID,” adds Ryan Mandl, Managing Director at Five Elms Capital. “AskNicely has developed a beautifully elegant set of software solutions to ensure every customer gets the right experience and the frontline worker gets the right feedback, coaching, and recognition for their work. Given that frontline workers makeup 80% of the planet’s working population, we see an enormous market opportunity for AskNicely’s Frontline Success Platform, and are excited to partner with Aaron and the AskNicely team to continue to develop innovative products for their fast-growing, global customer base.”
As AskNicely prepares to double headcount across its Portland, Auckland, and Amsterdam offices, the company is investing in a culture that it calls “experience-first”. Ward explains, “We think work from home or hybrid work models are short-changing our people. Where you work matters a lot less to us than the experiences you have doing the work”. He points to concepts like “Nice Days” where AskNicely staff can take time out anytime for mental well-being and “Work from Anywhere” travel incentives for staff to meet and work together anywhere in the world as examples of the range of experience-first benefits the company offers.
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