Hello Customer, the SaaS company that offers the most complete feedback insights platform, automating capturing, analysing and reporting on feedback and customer data, continues its strong growth. The Belgium-based scale-up, which employs more than 30 people and has a presence in various European countries, has raised six million euros in a new fundraising round with Senovo Capital and Peak, two prominent VC funds from Germany and The Netherlands. Hello Customer aims to make its high-performance platform even more efficient and is gearing up to consolidate its growth, both in Europe and in the US.
Hello Customer was founded in 2015 by Leslie Cottenjé, Bram De Vos and Joeri Pansaerts as a SaaS platform that enables businesses to analyse customer experiences and expectations, automatically distil useful insights from them and subsequently take actions to optimise the customer experience. The Hello Customer technology is based upon simple open feedback surveys to which linguistic algorithms and artificial intelligence are applied.
Hello Customer is very much in demand among financial institutions, utilities, services and retail chains. Over the past few years the company has also gained a foothold in the Netherlands, France and Spain but is exceedingly getting demand from other parts of Europe.
Especially during these times, feedback will be crucial
Five years into its existence, the future is looking bright for the Ghent scale-up. CEO Leslie Cottenjé: “The coronavirus has placed the relationship between companies and their customers under a magnifying glass. More than ever businesses realise the importance of listening to customers, especially now that personal contact has been absent for some time and online sales are booming. Our platform makes it possible to analyse customer experiences quickly and in an automated manner in order to determine how those customers feel about a brand, a shop, a product or a service. In fact, Hello Customer has made itself indispensable to businesses that wish to adapt to fast-changing consumer trends .”
New fundraising round supports ongoing growth
Despite the corona crisis a new fundraising round has just been concluded. New investors Senovo Capital and Peak recognise that the Hello Customer technology is outstanding and will become more crucial than ever. They have committed to invest 6 million euros. This funding follows a €2 million round in 2018, when Hello Customer raised seed capital from Dovesco (the fund of the brothers Anthony and Gregory De Clerck), Seeder Fund and a group of business angels among which the three founders of Showpad.
With a strong product vision and great execution so far, the new investor syndicate is thrilled to help Hello Customer grow into the CX technology leader it aims to be. Alexander Buchberger, managing director at Senovo Capital: “As enterprises must focus more and more on generating customer insights, we believe that the market for intelligent CX solutions bears significant upside potentials. By offering an unique end-to-end platform that provides an automated solution for engaging with customers and analyzing their feedback, Hello Customer is perfectly positioned.”
“Since our first meetings with Hello Customer we have been impressed by the team and their ability to serve renowned consumer brands. Empowering them to act on actionable data insights is a key value for them to improve their customer happiness and product development”, states Johan van Mil, co-founder & managing partner of Peak.
International expansion to be continued
Leslie Cottenjé: “Our main focus is obviously continued growth. On the one hand we keep investing in our technology through new developments, focusing even more on proactive analytics: combining feedback with operational data results in insights organisations can actually act on, right now. At the same time we are also ambitious in terms of expansion in new countries where we would like to be present. The whole world has been halted in its tracks, so we are reviewing our steps to take. But of course our biggest ambition is to land and expand in the US. That’s why we are happy to have experienced partners like Senovo Capital and Peak joining us, because they can help and support us on that journey. ”
Within the scope of that continued international expansion, Hello Customer managed to attract Marc Van Lerberghe as a member of the board. Van Lerberghe is a marketing and sales executive with generous experience in Silicon Valley. He was Chief Marketing Officer at Google Android for eight years. Currently he’s the CEO of a Conversational AI start-up in the Valley. Hello Customer has also appointed co-founder Bram De Vos as its new chairman.