No matter what kind of website it is, the customer journey has always been important, otherwise you lose that engagement and the end result can hit the bottom line. It always was.
But in the modern era, customers expect an easy and simple experience otherwise they will go elsewhere. And with the massive digitization that has taken place since COVID, the competition to get better is huge. In addition, the pandemic also created all kinds of new problems, as hybrid or remote teams now work at different times, leading to a spaghetti jungle of data.
Startups such as Milkymap (Netherlands), Smaply (Austria) and Journeytrack (USA) have emerged and are trying to tackle this burgeoning market, although it is unclear if any of them have already attracted venture funding.
So in a sense, the starting gun has now been fired in this market with the news that They do has now raised a €12 million series. Round A is led by Blossom Capital, with participation from 20VC, also in London. Participating in this round were Angels such as Des Traynor (Intercom) Founder and Grisha Pavlotsky (Miro), as well as other senior angels of unicorns such as Figma, Snowflake, Calendly, Retool and Amplitude.
TheyDo’s “Journey Management” platform addresses what is known as “customer-centric alignment,” an industry expected to be worth $48.5 billion by 2023 (according to Future market insights).
TheyDo claims to show companies what all the inbound metrics and quant data are tied to, where the data comes from, and how it all impacts the customer journey. This means teams from CX to product, marketing, sales and customer success have a more comprehensive ‘dashboard’ on the issues to monitor and improve.
Founded by Jochem van der Veer, Charles Beaumont and Martin Palamarz, TheyDo says it is now used by teams from Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, T-Mobile and Qualtrics.
During a phone call, TheyDo co-founder Jochem van der Veer told me that large companies now care more about customer experience: “There is a mindset shift happening where these companies are now realizing that organizing around their customer journey is the only way they can be relevant And they lack the tools to actually support that workflow.”
Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, warm to that theme, added: “With consumer expectations of products increasing there is just a real fragmentation of roles within companies. Now when we look at all the different roles within the product, from product management, product marketing, and everything in between, the fragmentation of all these different functions means that it’s increasingly difficult to create one great, unified experience because you’re working in isolation. And so the specialization of these roles means it’s increasingly important to have one unified stream to create that great experience.”
That’s where TheyDo comes in, says van der Veer: “It’s really that whole way of organizing large organizations internally, taking into account the customer’s perspective. And that is the huge trend that TheyDo is responding to.”
He says his clients now range from the Dutch Post, to Johnson and Johnson, to Atlassian.
Interestingly, the journey to the TheyDo product came from Van der Veer and his co-founders’ experience as a CX agency (or “SWAT team” as he calls it), where they entered a company to find out what went wrong. From that experience they produced a product to ‘scratch their own itch’ and this became TheyDo.
“We were hired as a consultancy in these large Fortune 500 companies to transform them from the inside out. But we realized that in order to scale our business, we needed some software to extend what we were doing. In the end our client would say ‘can we hire you to do this job and also get that technical solution you have?’ Then we realized there might be something bigger here,” he told me.
Stebbings points out that this is exactly a pattern he looks for in startups as an investor: “I learned that there is a pattern when you have agencies that become products because they build them in-house and their clients love it. From Intercom to MailChimp. They tend to work really well.
That remains to be seen in the case of TheyDo. However, it is clear that Blossom and 20VC are both counting on history repeating itself.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.