Jaakko Männistö tells us about Feedbackly, the only CXM solution that measures customers’ emotions
First of all, how are you and your family doing?
Jaakko Männistö: Thank you for asking! My family is safe and sound, even though this sitting at home for years is starting to take a toll on everyone! But we are getting back to normal step by step.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Feedbackly.
Jaakko Männistö: I started my own first business when I was 12-years old. Of course, it was not a “real” business but nevertheless. Since then, I have done whatever I could get my hands into. The current case I have, Feedbackly, started initially about 10 years ago when we noticed a problem in the customer experience measurement market. We started as a consultancy and turned our company to be Feedbakcly, a Saas business, in late 2016.
The company was founded when we were still at the university, so we started slow but pretty quickly got the business up and running.
Feedbackly was created in the summer of 2012 by three young business students, Jaakko, Joonas, and Joonatan. Jaakko was fascinated by the psychology of happiness and what drove that happiness. Together with the same passion for technology and business, they knew they wanted to change the way companies thought about the idea of the “customer experience” but didn’t know exactly how they would achieve that. In the beginning, the idea was to help smaller brick & mortar companies find an easy and automated way to handle their feedback collection.
After discussing their experiences over a few beers, they had a chat with Joonas (Co-founder), a software developer and close friend and the only person they knew who could code. The founding partners were finally together. After putting together a minimum viable product, the founding trio landed their first customer – even though their core product wasn’t finalized. As always with new companies, the execution started off a little hazy, but the core idea of creating the happiest customers in the world at a large scale was always there!
EVI® – Emotional Value Index was created in 2015 and commercialized a couple of years later. I created EVI® and is the heart of Feedbackly as the emotional experience is the core of customer experiences now and in the future.
How does Feedbackly market its product/services online?
Jaakko Männistö: Feedbackly is a Customer Experience Management platform (CXM) that helps you to measure your customer experience via surveys throughout the entire customer journey. This means that you can better understand your customers online and offline. Feedbackly offers tools, methods, and help in one place, so there is no need for additional services. Above all, Feedbackly specializes in Emotional Experience and is pioneering using EVI® – Emotional Value Index to measure it and develop our customers’ businesses.
How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how did you get through it?
Jaakko Männistö: We had a major drop in revenue when the pandemic started, but we managed to get through the situation by creating new products and innovative new ways to do marketing. Now our customer base is much more pandemic resilient, so we don’t see huge risks anymore.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Jaakko Männistö: Well, obviously, we use our own tools a lot to better understand customers, which is the main key. In addition that we have created marketing automation throughout the customer journey with Hubspot integrated with Feedbackly.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Jaakko Männistö: We don’t have too many direct competitors as there are no software providers who specialize in Emotional Experience. All of the competition is focused on more traditional customer experience measurement but not too much on understanding customers’ emotions. This said, if you are looking for a software solution or services around emotional experience, Feedbackly is the way to go!
Your final thoughts?
Jaakko Männistö: The world is changing faster than ever, so let’s stay with the change and not fight it. The same way goes for purchasing behavior – better to understand your customers’ emotions and not just the old static customer experience KPIs!
0 Comments