When does someone go from just being another customer to a staunch advocate — someone who will vouch for a product or service and recommend it to everyone they know?
Conventional thinking might say it’s when that person opts to add eight more Stanley cups into their shopping cart after already owning four at home, but researchers at Santa Clara-based DropThought say it’s the opposite. The software company, which is trying to solve the age-old dilemma of gathering meaningful customer feedback, instead is interested in helping its clients identify a negative experience as soon as possible.
“Because if you can respond to a bad interaction, correct it and make that person happy, chances are they will remember that moment even more,” Navin Prasad, vice president of DropThought said.
DropThought's technology is getting tested in the high-impact world of professional football. And with the Super Bowl set to take place in less than two weeks, it has an existing client — the Kansas City Chiefs — and a potential customer in the San Francisco 49ers up against each other.
DropThought Experience Management Platform.
Earlier in the season, the company showed off its technology in a 49ers home game at Levi's Stadium. During the Oct. 29 game against the Cincinnati Bengals, the company hosted investors and members of the media at a suite at the stadium. There, it had deployed touch-screen tablets around the building in a bid to persuade the NFC championship winners to adopt its products fully at scale.
Each tablet includes a short survey that polls guests on how their fan experience is going. Questions range from how it was navigating to someone's seat to what it was like to buy concessions or how clean were the bathrooms — all things that companies have wanted to know from their customers for ages.
But how DropThought is bringing the survey into the 21st century is in the immediacy of the response. Once customers complete the questionnaire, those answers are instantly fed over to a platform where someone behind the scenes can immediately analyze that data, zooming in or out as much as necessary, to take corrective actions. Picture a live scoreboard or a box score for the entire venue in one’s hands.
“Anyone can pass out surveys,” Roy Barman, DropThought chief technology officer, told The Business Journal. “What differentiates us is the holistic service. You don’t need to hire a data analyst and you can act right away.”
Historically, customer feedback would be collected in batches. Maybe a company would hear from customers at the end of an event, or even worse in sports, at the end of the season. By then, the opportunity to convert unsatisfied customers into advocates has passed, the DropThought team argues.
Still, in today’s day and age, even tablets are as cumbersome as handing out paper surveys. But since sports teams like the 49ers are historic institutions unto themselves, they prefer to “play it slower” with new technologies, said Deepak Pillai, head of customer success at DropThought.
While the 49ers are still trialing the new platform, other NFL teams, mainly the Chiefs — who will be defending their Super Bowl Champion status against the 49ers on Feb. 11 — and the Jacksonville Jaguars have already singed on. Instead of the expensive overhead of maintaining tablets all around their venues, both teams display large QR codes that will load surveys directly onto attendees’ phones.
The more data that the teams provide, the richer the insights will be, Pillai explained. For example, the Chiefs provided three years of prior data from Ticketmaster so that they can find more themes and trends about guests that come to its home field, Arrowhead Stadium.
DropThought didn’t come into existence thinking about sports. Before it became its own company, the customer feedback technology was a part of Indian conglomerate Bahwan CyberTek Group and was primarily used in industries like transportation, hospitality and retail. It was through happenstance, that some sports teams in the company’s network began asking around about how to improve customer feedback.
In addition to better understanding customer sentiment, companies began using it to gauge employee satisfaction as well, Pillai said. Because DropThought has the support of Bahwan CyberTek, it doesn’t have the short run way of a traditionally venture capital-funded startup.
“It allows us to just think about getting the technology right,” Pillai said. “We want to become indispensable to these teams first.”
He continued: “The thing with these sports teams is that they are spoiled, but in a good way… They have everything from heat maps to foot traffic data. It’s a challenge to show how you could still provide them value, but it is exciting to surprise them.”
Pillai lamented that most sports teams only make their investment decisions once they are in the offseason.
But luckily in this case, DropThought still keeps its offices at Great America Parkway, in a building it shares with Boston Scientific. Every Sunday this season, Pillai and the rest of his leadership team was only a 15 minute walk to Levi’s Stadium.
