Chattermill raises £600K to use ‘deep learning’ to help companies make sense of customer feedback

Chattermill, a London-based startup that uses ‘deep learning’ to help companies make better sense of customer feedback, has raised £600,000 in seed funding. Backing comes from Entrepreneur First — Chattermill is an alumnus of the company builder — and Avonmore Developments, along with a number of angel investors, including Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Seedrs.

Founded in 2015 by friends Mikhail Dubov and Dmitry Isupov, Chattermill is one of a number of startups that are tackling the problem of how to sift through and respond to customer feedback and across multiple channels. With that data growing exponentially, the company is employing deep learning to help do the job in, arguably, a much more scalable and potentially more accurate way.

“We help companies understand and improve their customer experience: we give companies insight that helps them craft better products and services,” Dubov, Chattermill’s CEO, tells me. “Companies with best in class customer experience ultimately have more loyal customers and find it easier acquiring them in the first place. Customer feedback is the best data to understand customer experience and while most companies have a lot of customer feedback, few have the tools to extract insight from it”.

He says the startup’s solution is to apply the latest deep learning techniques to analyse customer feedback in a way that is tailored for each company. “In addition to this we provide an analytics dashboard and automated alerts that make it very easy to take action on the insight across the business,” he says.

Specifically, Chattermill collates all feedback channels in one place and then “builds a customised deep learning model to extract easily actionable insight”. It can then measure sentiment to see how customers are feeling about each part of the overall experience, from design of an app down to speed of delivery and attitude of customer care agents.

In terms of how it collects customer feedback data in the first place, Chattermill integrates many standard tools used for soliciting and monitoring customer feedback and sentiment, such as SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, TypeForm or Salesforce, in addition to aggregating feedback from Net Promoter Score surveys, reviews, support tickets and social media.

The ten-person Chattermill team is currently working with customers across sectors that include, fintech, e-commerce, travel and gaming. “We work with consumer businesses that have a large customer base across industries,” says Dubov. “Notable examples are Transferwise, HelloFresh and Just Eat. Within these companies we work with the product, customer service and customer experience teams”.