Delighted, a startup that aims to help businesses collect and analyze customer feedback, is ready to move its product out of private beta testing and make it available to any customer.
In addition, the company is announcing that it has raised funding (it won’t say how much) from Google Ventures, Shasta Ventures, SV Angel, Designer Fund, Fuel Capital, Relay Ventures, Ben Ling, Bobby Goodlatte, Jason Shellen and Fred Reichheld.
Delighted was founded by Caleb Elston, Mark Dodwell and Mike Gowen. The three of them worked together on the Mosaic iPhone app for photobook company Mixbook, and Elston and Gowen also worked together on Yobongo, the mobile chat startup that Elston co-founded (which was eventually acquired by Mixbook).
It’s been more than a year since I wrote about the company — Elston (who’s also Delighted’s CEO) said at the time that the team would do something related to customer feedback, but it was too early to get specific about the product. Since then, Delighted has been testing its product with a number of businesses. In fact, if you’ve responded to a customer survey recently from Design Within Reach, Bonobos, Eventbrite, Goodreads, TaskRabbit or Hotel Tonight, it was probably created and sent via Delighted.
So what makes this different from the other survey tools out there? Again, the aim is to be super simple, both on the customer side and the business side. Hopefully, that can mean the business gets feedback from a larger, more representative group of customers, not just the ones with big complaints or who need assistance.
Elston gave me a quick tour of the product to illustrate his point. When you receive an email survey (on desktop, mobile or tablet), you’re asked to respond with a single click that indicates how you’d rate your experience with a given product or service. You can offer a more in-depth explanation, but all you need to do to complete the survey is make one click.
It’s pretty simple to create those surveys, too — Elston whipped one up in just a few minutes during the demo. And once a survey goes out, businesses can track their Net Promoter Score, to get a general sense of how they’re doing. Then they can dive deeper into the numbers by searching for specific terms or filtering by different customer types.
Other features include the ability to trigger surveys with certain in-product events, to cap the number of surveys that a customer has seen (not just from you but from any Delighted business), and to send team members email digests highlighting positive and negative feedback. Elston also noted that Delighted doesn’t charge per seat, which means there’s nothing stopping a company from making customer feedback available to anyone on the team.
Asked if he’s interested in going beyond email surveys, Elston said Delighted is also looking at things like live chat, but he suggested that email will likely remain at the core of the experience.
And here’s a video showcasing Delighted’s work with Bonobos.