Beyond basic customer surveys, InquireLabs it wants to bring speed and scale to third-party data, which is just a fancy way of saying data that customers provide directly to brands.
CEO Matt Bahr and Curt Hasselschwert came up with the idea for the company in 2018 while helping e-commerce brands solve marketing attrition through questions like "how did you hear about our services or company?" after a purchase.
They spent the next two years with InquireLabs as a side project to others underway, but when they began to see e-commerce brands look at their reliance on third-party data, particularly with Internet cookies, they began to see some traction.
"I think people were very needy for data," Bahr said. “Historically, the brands we work with were so dependent on Facebook that they didn't necessarily need to know their customers very well because Facebook was simply looking for the ideal customer profile for them. By getting rid of third-party cookies, Apple essentially made it that much harder for brands to drive conversions."
That's when Bahr and Hasselschwert began to focus on customer churn. In 2021, the New York-based company raised just under half a million dollars to make er grow your technology and allow customers They asked multiple questions.
What they started to build became the product question flow, which includes a chronological campaign of questions, each served through programmable rules and based on context throughout the customer journey.
The question engine InquireLabs decides when questions are asked based on variables. The technology knows who to consult based on unique identifier data based on information such as email or phone number. This is a great R&D focus for the company and one of the drivers for it to eventually go beyond commerce into different verticals of the company.
As Bahr described it, InquireLabs you're decoupling the questions from each other so they can be asked over time, after the purchase. This is where you say the differentiator is between your company and incumbents like Momentive/SurveyMonkey or Typeform that focus more on the research space, while InquireLabs it focuses on how to use data in real time. Typeform recently received $135 million in new funding for its "conversational data collection" approach.
The company is working with some 2.000 brands, including Allbirds, Figs and Skims, and captured more than 30 million responses last year, and survey completion rates exceed 50%, which Bahr said was another differentiator from the pairs of InquireLabs, where the average response is 10%.
When asked how the company was able to get that level of response, Bahr explained that the main reason is that InquireLabs provides context with the questions being asked, which leads to a level of personalization.
"Based on our data, we know who hates answering certain types of questions, so we're not going to ask those types of questions because we know they're never going to answer," he added. “The idea is to build from scratch who is the customer first and what we want to learn from them. This is different from the investigation side where they are looking at what the issues are and then who the customer is.”
Those responses are funneled into information that customers can access from your dashboard and use that information in your existing marketing platform to send unique emails that better highlight the brand.
Previously available exclusively for Shopify brands, InquireLabs started getting incoming requests from new verticals like mobile apps, insurance, and fintech, so it's now launched its software development kit beta program to expand into new verticals, fueled by $4.5 million in seed funding.
The round was led by True Ventures, with participation from V1.VC, FiDi Ventures, Hawke Ventures, Silicon Ventures and a group of individual investors including Chubbies founders Ted Wang, Harris Barton, Daphne Carmeli and Casey Armstrong.
Bahr expects to spend most of the funds on hiring, primarily to expand the organization's product and engineering businesses. InquireLabs it had been a small team of two before July 2021, and having doubled its income in the past 12 months, Bahr said he's ready to "put some gas on."
"Given the volume we're doing, we're very excited to expand the engineering side of the business and continue to innovate in that area," he added. “Our roadmap stretches well beyond a year in terms of what we want to do with question flow. Also, the more powerful our internal question engine is, the better. That is definitely our focus during 2022.”
