Wyoming startup UserEvidence raises $9M to automate customer success stories

As business-to-business (B2B) companies and software vendors know, creating and sharing customer testimonials and success stories is often key to convincing new customers to sign on. It’s natural: people want to hear about others like them who have benefitted from a new solution, software, tool, or other product/service.

However, creating customer success stories internally can be challenging, especially for small-to-medium sized enterprises without large teams of in-house content creators. What can B2B software vendors looking to create customer success stories use to help them?

UserEvidence, a three-year-old startup headquartered in the unusual location of ski town Jackson Hole, Wyoming, thinks it has the right tools for the job: its “customer voice platform,” an intuitive web-based application, allows enterprises to create simple surveys to send to their satisfied customers with customizable questions — e.g. “what did you like about your experience with us?” — and automatically converts the results into proof points and professional marketing content that can be easily searched, retrieved, and shared out to other prospects.

Today, the company is announcing a $9 million Series A funding round led by Crosslink Capital with participation from Founder Collective, Afore and Next Frontier Capital. In total, counting pre-seed funding, UserEvidence has raised $14 million to date. Not bad for a new startup outside the traditional big tech centers of Silicon Valley, the Pac Northwest, and the Northeast Corridor.

“Basically what Marketo did for marketing automation, and Outreach did for sales automation, we’re using 1-to-many automation to enable software vendors to automate customer marketing,” wrote Evan Huck, CEO and founder of UserEvidence, in an email to VentureBeat.

A passive, central repository for collecting and sharing customer success stories

Instead of bothering satisfied customers and risking alienating them with a number of different requests for testimonials from different team members, UserEvidence enables its enterprise customers to centralize all their customer feedback requests and surveys in one place, keep track of them all, and have them passively and automatically sent out in the background to their customers when certain conditions are met.

Helpfully, UserEvidence then automatically organizes and stores an enterprise’s customer survey responses and testimonial quotes into a single, searchable database — what UserEvidence calls a “research library” — where the enterprise vendor can then pull up any specific piece of customer feedback or batches of them that support different topics and proof points.

The goal is to replace cumbersome, ad-hoc systems like spreadsheets, shared cloud drives that may not have the right permissions or feedback all in one place or unhelpfully labeled file names, and feedback otherwise hidden and tucked away in emails or messages.

Built to support marketers, sales enablement, demand gen and anyone who needs customer testimonials

Enterprise marketers — or sales enablement personnel, or anyone of any function who has access to UserEvidence at the enterprise — can then log into UserEnterprise and use its built-in conversational AI chat function to ask the tool for customer proof points about any specific feature, topic, or challenge.

In a demo video shared with VentureBeat a hypothetical worker asked UserEvidence’s chatbot “what solution did people use before [ours]?” and the chatbot nearly instantly delivered customer quotes answering the question and explaining what they did not like about the prior solution. The enterprise user continued the conversation to ask follow-up questions and for more specific pieces of data about how much time the new vendor’s solution saved for that customer.

“Imagine any function (ie marketing, product management/strategy, customer success/account management) being able to directly derive insights from a massive pool of customer feedback, democratizing access to the voice of the customer,” wrote Huck in an email to VentureBeat.

Fine-grained filters for different customers and success metrics

In addition, UserEvidence supports the ability for users to filter feedback by “industry, company size, seniority, and role for every conversation imaginable,” according to its website. The UserEvidence research library contains a drop down menu to filter the feedback by asset type, allowing software vendors to pull up charts, customer spotlights, testimonials, statistics, reports, and even whole “microsites” showing off how the customer benefitted from using the vendor’s solutions.

UserEvidence then lets its enterprise users share these testimonials out easily with dedicated URLs that display the feedback and the source speaker and survey, along with a custom UserEvidence ID number (UEID) for asset tracking. See an example below:

Notable customers and a commitment to a ‘balanced life’

Already, UserEvidence itself has a number of satisfied enterprise customers whose testimonials are broadcast across its website, among them: Bill.com (formerly Divvy), Gitlab, Gong, Jasper.ai, Ramp, Splunk and others.

UserEvidence is further proud of its roots in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with remote workers across the country, and notes on its website that among its values are “balance.”

Befitting a startup headquartered in a ski town, UserEvidence even has a “powder policy” which reads as follows: “If it snows more than 7 inches, ski in the morning and work in the afternoon.”

“If someone wants to ski from 8–11 AM on a 10” powder day, and work later at night that night — that’s awesome,” Huck said in an interview with Authority Magazine. “That person comes into the office amped and stoked and beaming, and they are excited to work. That’s the culture I want to work in.”