In this hyper-connected world we live in, it's easier than ever to provide feedback to the companies you patronize. But just because a company offers more ways to contact you doesn't mean they read every comment. According to Productboard's 2020 research, 90% of companies are having trouble collecting feedback from all channels, and one-third have no process at all to collect feedback.
Varun Sharma realized this acutely while leading customer success efforts at LinkedIn, analytics software company Amplitude, and startup Scale AI. Despite their best efforts, product and customer experience teams struggled to use customer feedback in decision-making, Sharma said.
So in 2020, Sharma hired his brother Arnab Sharma to build a tool to solve the customer feedback pain points businesses were experiencing. Conveniently, Arnav has a background in software engineering, having worked as a developer at Uber for three years.
“Customer interactions are a valuable, yet underutilized data set for every business,” Varun told TechCrunch. “If we can meaningfully unlock it, we can build best-in-class products and drive business growth.”
Over the years, Varun and Arnav's tools have expanded into Enterpret, a platform that connects various feedback sources and applies algorithms to extract insights. Enterpret highlights overarching themes and emerging issues in customer comments, helping teams decide on things like what products to build.
Enterpret dashboard. Image credit:Enterpret
“Enterpret captures all of a company's customer interactions in real time, including sales calls, support tickets, survey responses, “to leverage the company's data to operationalize decision-making,'' Varun said.
Businesses can define rules to scrub scraped data for personally identifiable information such as IP addresses and names. Varun says that to comply with GDPR, Enterpret does not maintain control over its customers' data.
Varun has also helped clients like Canva and Monday.com analyze millions of customer feedbacks to detect early signs of customer churn and validate (and in some cases disprove) product hypotheses. He added that he uses Enterpret, which has been
Enterpret is not without competitors in the space, such as ScopeAI, which was acquired by Observe.AI in 2021 for its technology that helps businesses analyze customer feedback. Another competitor, Zendesk-owned Klaus, automatically categorizes and scores customer interactions.
But San Francisco-based Enterpret's strategy appears to be working. At least that's enough to double the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) between May and now. Enterpret's contract value has doubled in the past 12 months, Varun said, and the company recently closed a $20.8 million Series A round.
“Our ARR is in the seven digits,” Varun added. “Momentum is strong. We decided to raise capital to support our growth.”
Varun said the short-term plan is to use the funding from the Series A led by Canaan Partners with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Peak XV Partners, Wing Ventures and Recall Capital to fund hiring and product research and development. Enterpret has raised a total of $25 million to date.
“Enterpret's ambitious vision is rooted in the recognition that customer feedback is the most valuable data set for any business,” said Varun. “Our mission is to build a platform for all companies that want to become customer-centric.”