It doesn’t matter what type of website it is, the ‘customer journey’ is always important, otherwise you will lose that interaction and the end result can affect profitability. That is always the case.
But in the modern era, customers expect an easy and simple experience, otherwise they will move elsewhere. And with the massive digitization going on since COVID, the competition to be better is huge. Furthermore, the pandemic also creates all kinds of new problems, because hybrid or remote teams now work at different times, resulting in a spaghetti data junction.
Startups such as Milkymap (Netherlands), Smaply (Austria) and Journeytrack (US) have emerged, trying to tackle this burgeoning market, although it’s unclear if any of them exist. Can you raise venture capital?
So, in a sense, the starting shot in this market was fired with the news that They do has now raised €12 million in a Series A round led by Blossom Capital, with participation from 20VC, also based in London. Participating in this round were Angels like Founders Des Traynor (Intercom) and Grisha Pavlotsky (Miro), as well as other high-ranking angels from unicorns such as Figma, Snowflake, Calendly, Retool, and Amplitude.
TheyDo’s ‘Cruise Management’ platform tackles the so-called ‘customer-centric alignment’, a sector forecast to be worth $48.5 billion by 2023 (according to Future market insights).
Their aim is to show businesses where all the incoming metrics and quantitative data are linked, where the data comes from and how all of that impacts the customer journey. any. This means that teams from CX to product, marketing, sales and customer success have a more comprehensive ‘dashboard’ of issues to track and improve on.
Founded by Jochem van der Veer, Charles Beaumont and Martin Palamarz, TheyDo says it’s currently used by teams from Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, T-Mobile and Qualtrics.
Over a phone call, TheyDo co-founder Jochem van der Veer told me that big businesses are now taking customer experience seriously: “There’s a mindset shift going on as these companies appear to be present. are realizing that organizing around the customer journey is the only way they can do it. stay relevant. And they’re lacking the tools to really support that workflow.”
Warming up to that topic, 20VC founder Harry Stebbings added: “With increasing consumer expectations for products, there is only real division of roles within companies. Now, when we consider all the different roles in the product from product management, to product marketing and everything in between, the fragmentation of all these different functions means that It’s harder to create a great unified experience because you’re working in isolation. And so it’s increasingly important to specialize in these roles that there’s a unified flow to creating that great experience.”
“It’s really the whole way of organizing the internals of large organizations, taking into account the customer’s point of view,” says Van der Veer. And that’s the big ongoing trend TheyDo is addressing.”
He said their customers now range from the Dutch Postal Service, to Johnson and Johnson, to Atlassian.
Interestingly, the journey towards the TheyDo product stems from the experience of van der Veer and his co-founders as a CX company (or “SWAT team” as he calls it). , where they’ll go to a company to figure out what’s going on. From that experience, they created a product to ‘scratch the itch right’ and this became They do.
“We were hired as a consulting firm for these 500 large businesses to transform them from within. But we realized that to scale our business, we needed some software to scale what we were doing. In the end, our customers will say ‘can we hire you to do this work and can we also get the technology solution you have?’ That’s when we realized there could be something bigger here,” he told me.
Stebbings points out that this is exactly the pattern he looks for in startups, as an investor: “I learned that there is a pattern where you have agents turning into products. products because they build them internally and their customers love them. From Intercom to MailChimp. They tend to work very well.
That remains to be seen in the case of TheyDo. However, it is clear that Blossom and 20VC are both believing that history will repeat itself.
