Founded last year, Survaider wants to help hotels and other hospitality view and act upon customer comments across social media, email, phone calls and feedback forms.
The idea is to aggregate all of the interactions in one place and in real time enabling hospitality businesses to communicate with customers, highlight common issues and direct them to the relevant people.
Q&A with co-founder and CTO Madhulika Mukherjee:
What problem does your business solve?
Customers today are talking about a business on multiple different channels, like reviews on OTAs, review websites, social media mails, calls direct feedback forms etc. Listening and understanding them is a huge pain for businesses.
Any small hotel chain will typically have 100+ different links to monitor, then aggregate offline feedback, read and reply to mails. Because this is so messy, it takes business four different departments and 120+ hours online just to get some grip on it or to derive any insights from it.
Names of founders, their management roles, and number of full-time paid staff?
Madhulika Mukherjee handles technology and operations at Survaider, and Tushar Mishra handles business and strategy. The number of full time staff is six.
Funding arrangements?
The startup raised a seed round from Axilor ventures.
Revenue model?
It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) product with a subscription model where businesses pay a fee per month.
Why do you think the pain point you’re solving is painful enough that customers are willing to pay for your solution?
There is an 18% revenue difference in a four-star and a five-star rated business. While 70% of bookings are coming online for most hotels, 80% of people booking would let go of a hotel with recent negative reviews.
Businesses are realizing that customer experience has a direct relationship with their revenues. To improve CX, they need to listen, understand and then act of customer opinions to solve problems and take better data driven decisions.
External validation?
We were one of 10 chosen startups from around India in Axilor venture’s highly competitive accelerator program. From there we have raised seed investment. In the past three months of being in business, we’ve grown from two to 120 live accounts on our platform and aim to reach 200 by the end on January.
We’ve replaced competitive products for 60% of our customers.
We have some great mentors backing us. Subinder Khurana, has been helping us out with business strategy since the beginning.
As for the team, we have a very strong tech background. Both the founders, Tushar and Madhulika, have delved in previous entrepreneurial stints since their graduation days.
They are engineers with strong experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing.
Working in this space for about two years now, we know the who’s who of the hospitality industry, have great connections with a couple of hundred hoteliers and industry leaders who have decades of experience, who have believed in us and put faith in the cause our product is fighting for - making all businesses more customer-centric.
Video pitch:
Tnooz view:
This seems like a valuable service. Most businesses now accept that listening in on and responding to social media is vital for reputation.
Further, recent research from Barclays points to the financial importance of feedback and the appropriate response.
And, an academic study reveals that who responds, as well as the length of response, are also crucial.
But, the sheer volume of comments and feedback makes for overwhelming noise in a world where everyone has a view and voices it.
Survaider says it's addressing all that and the startup claims to be the only platform aggregating all of the feedback in one place so it can be acted on efficiently.
What might be hard for Survaider is gaining traction with a number of already tried and tested listening type services on the market.
That said, its launch is timely, with the current focus on customer experience in the travel industry, and seems to enable companies to go a step further than departments established for social media listening by some travel companies.