Delighted: A Disruptive “Voice of the Customer” Solution for the Rest of Us

If you’re looking to hire temporary workers, you might find yourself using Wonolo, an Uber-like service that connects job seekers with hiring companies. Wonolo currently boasts 60,000 jobs and 50,000 pre-screened workers (“Wonoloers”).

According to John Flaaten, Director of Business Operations, Wonolo wanted a simple tool to get feedback from thousands of businesses using the service. For obvious reasons — if they aren’t happy, workers don’t get hired and the Wonolo business model falls apart.

In the olden days of, say, 5 years ago, one might attempt to solve this problem with a “Voice of the Customer” solution from software companies like Confirmit, InMoment, or Satmetrix. Or, find a service provider to outsource the customer feedback process. But Flaaten, based on prior experience at another company, thought Delighted was up to the task.

In operation for about eight months now, Flaaten says they survey 4500 business users each month, asking them the NPS (would you recommend?) question plus an optional comment. Wonolo can then track responses in real-time, segmented by type of customer and other business data. Executives can — and do — log in to review trends and read user comments, which Flaaten say helps drive action.

None of this is groundbreaking, except for the part that Wonolo signed up online and started using Delighted without any engineering support. Integration with Slack, Salesforce, and Zendesk was also accomplished without hiring an expensive integrator.

Flaaten says pricing was another key factor. Delighted starts at just $25/month to survey 100 people per month, with options up to $249/month to survey 10,000 people per month.

Test Drive

I took Delighted for a spin and it was, well, delightful. I could easily signup without a credit card, run a test (up to 250 surveys) and play around.

While I’m not personally a fan of the NPS question, it can work about the same as CSAT and — like it or not — NPS has a lot of advocates. In a few minutes I tailored the email invitation and conducted a test. Perfect.

The demo site was also very useful. So let’s say you spot a dip in NPS and want to figure out why. Here’s a example of drilling down to “detractors” (0 to 6 responses) who provided a comment using a mobile device. You can review the comments and try to understand what’s going on.

Disruptor for VoC Industry?

Delighted was launched four years ago after the founders struggled to gather feedback with tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Docs. Co-founder/CEO Caleb Elston says they decided to build a solution themselves, starting with a simple NPS survey delivered via email. They’ve just added web and SMS support.

This is an excellent example of disruptive innovation:

Disruptive innovation, a term of art coined by Clayton Christensen, describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.
— Source: http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/

Now the company has over 1,000 customers, including some major tech brands like Slack, Sonos, and Uber. I’ll wager that some of Delighted’s customers are also using enterprise-class VoC solutions, but are experimenting with Delighted at the departmental or business unit level. Successful usage will be expanded — a “land and expand” strategy that has worked for SaaS providers, PC vendors and other new technologies.

In my view, this is a real breakthrough that could bring a complete VoC solution within easy reach of any size business. By “complete” I mean enabling a systematic approach to capture, analyze, and — this is the most important thing — ACT on feedback.

There are some striking parallels here with the emergence of SaaS (now called Cloud) solutions for CRM around 20 years ago, and more recently with sign-up-and-use consumer apps. Delighted’s approach is to “disrupt from below” with a simple, low-cost, and easy solution.

What’s Next

While there are technical pros and cons of various metrics, my research has found that the choice of VoC metrics has no relationship to business success (growth, market share). What really matters is a bias for acting on feedback — the second-most important performance indicator among the 25 I studied.

Another key issue is management participation — leading by example — and Delighted excels here because it’s easy to give access to anyone in the company. Pricing is not based on the number of users.

Delighted won’t be a solution (yet) for those that want to use a different feedback question, change the scale, add more questions, etc. But it seems to me that after proving out the business model with a simple NPS survey, additional tailoring options could be easily provided. That could be key to winning over some enterprise users.

Elston says: “We started with NPS to gather feedback on the entire experience, but we plan to help companies with all their feedback needs in the future.” We’ll just have to wait and see what “all” means.

Disclosure: This post is part of my independent coverage of technology industry developments, and is not an endorsement of any company mentioned.