AskNicely, the #1 rated customer experience platform, today announced a USD 10 million Series A round and the launch of Conversations, an intelligent customer feedback framework.

The investment round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and K1W1. Abhishek Sharma of Nexus Venture Partners will join the AskNicely board. With this new investment, AskNicely will continue to build out the platform that helps businesses stay on top of customer feedback, motivate staff to deliver better customer experiences and drive customer advocacy.

"This funding reflects the accelerating shift in the way modern businesses approach customer experience. More leaders are recognizing the urgent need to ensure the experience for every customer hits the mark so that they'll become advocates for the brand and, ultimately, accelerate growth," said Aaron Ward, co-founder & CEO of AskNicely. "It's no longer enough to do an annual customer survey and get strokey-beardy about it in the boardroom. This movement is about helping businesses ignite a customer obsessed culture across their entire workforce, all powered by real-time customer feedback."

"No one blinks an eye at investing in technology to drive marketing and sales, yet many companies are flying blind when it comes to managing the customer experience. It won't be long before we look back and shake our heads at how we used to operate businesses without customer experience software," added Aaron.

The announcement follows the recent USD 8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics by SAP which underlined the value of customer experience in the marketing technology stack. "We've been huge believers in customer experience as a major priority for companies globally, yet it's surprising that most have no scalable way to systematically measure, analyze, and operationalize it," said Abhishek Sharma of Nexus Venture Partners. "We were blown away by the ease of use and simplicity of AskNicely. Rated as the #1 Enterprise Feedback Management platform on the G2 Crowd, AskNicely has a highly ambitious product vision and is perfectly placed to help businesses win with superior customer experience."

The latest product advancement, Conversations, captures feedback with a familiar chat format where questions vary dynamically based on intelligence about the customer's situation and sentiment. "Traditional surveys feel more like an interrogation when they should be conversations," says Ward. "With AskNicely Conversations, businesses now get more actionable feedback from more customers by avoiding asking lots of unnecessary questions and make sharing feedback feel like answering a text message - it just takes seconds." It supports all popular customer experience metrics including Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) and integrates with over 40 different platforms including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Intercom, Zendesk and Hubspot.

AskNicely now has over 50 employees across offices in Auckland, New Zealand where it was originally founded and Portland, Oregon where the business is now headquartered. "Portland is the perfect base to build an iconic customer experience platform. This city 'gets' customer experience more than any other city in the world which enables us to build a truly authentic, customer obsessed culture," Aaron explains.

About AskNicely

AskNicely is a customer experience platform that helps over 1,000 businesses globally to deliver great experiences using real-time customer feedback (based on the Net Promoter Score framework). Rated the #1 Enterprise Feedback Management platform by G2Crowd, AskNicely helps front-line staff deliver the right experience for every customer, everyday. Founded in 2014, AskNicely has offices in Portland, Oregon and Auckland, New Zealand. To learn more, visit https://www.asknicely.com.

About Nexus Venture Partners

Nexus Venture Partners is a leading early stage venture capital firm that operates as a single team between the US and India. With decades of experience in building and funding globally leading companies, Nexus manages over USD 1.5 billion across funds. The Nexus family includes H2O.ai, Druva, Postman, Headspin, Helpshift, Infoworks, Cloud.com, Minio, Aryaka, Kaltura, Pubmatic, Mezi, Gluster, Biz2Credit, Rancher, Clover, Delhivery, Snapdeal, Shopclues, and OLX. To learn more, please visit https://nexusvp.com.