Interview With Portland Oregon Startup: Hively, Easy Engagement Feedback Platform

Businesses, retail establishments and restaurants have been using the internet for surveys for the past fifteen years. Lot’s of restaurants still resort to printing a phone number to call or a website to go to to enter a code, do a survey and get some kind of discount. The problem with this method of surveying is, despite the reward, there is still extremely low engagement.

Even customer service surveys at the end of a call to a cell phone carrier or cable provider go unanswered, and that’s after you’ve said yes you’ll answer the quick two minute survey. Most travel related surveys that I get in my personal in box go straight to a spam folder and never get completed.  In fact the only time I typically fill out a survey is if the customer experience was bad, and there are a lot of people in the same boat as me.

An Oregon startup called Hively is looking to change that for business. They are hoping their platform will have a better engagement rate for two primary reasons. It takes just nanoseconds to complete and they make it happy and fun. Hively just asks one simple question, please provide feedback and with that simple question customers can quickly hit one smiley face, like the ones above, and that’s it.

On the side of the employee, employees who receive good feedback are awarded points that they can accrue for a prize.

We got the chance to interview Hively’s co-founder Jason Lander, check out the interview below:

Hively is the simplest way to gather customer feedback, measure customer happiness and reward your employee for making customers happy. Customers can now provide you with 1 click feedback at their convenience, every time they interact with someone from your company. They do this by clicking on either a happy, satisfied or unhappy smiley face in the signature line of every email your team members send, or by responding to direct requests sent through Hively by your team members.

Customers can leave anonymous feedback or leave more details and their contact information. They can also indicate if one of your team members ‘WOW’d’ them.

Team members get points for positive feedback and a total customer happiness score. As a team leader, you can run weekly or monthly contests for the best score and directly reward your team members with virtual gift cards. Team members can also send each other ‘Kudos’ to recognize other team members for a job well done.

My business partner and I have worked together for over a decade. This is our second start up. Our first was a company called ShiftWise that we started in 2002 and exited in 2010.

Jason Lander – Founder/CEO

Founder of ShiftWise – web based scheduling and vendor management system for hospitals and staffing agencies. Started ShiftWise in 2002 and helped grow it to over $8M in annual revenue with over 1200 hospital clients nationwide. Sales and marketing strategist, front end and UI/UX web developer.

Ross Barbieri – Founder/CTO

Founder of ShiftWise – web based scheduling and vendor management system for hospitals and staffing agencies. Started ShiftWise in 2002 and helped grow it to over $8M in annual revenue with over 1200 hospital clients nationwide. Chief Technical Officer and backend web developer.

Portland, Oregon

It’s on fire. You can’t throw a rock without hitting someone that is in a start up are getting ready to start one. There is a huge tech start up scene with lots of community support from local investment groups, tech incubators and the city of Portland itself.

Hively lets business easily measure customer happiness and reward their employees for making customers happy. Typically business try to measure customer happiness with surveys. However, surveys are time consuming for businesses and their customers. No one has the time to complete a survey, the data is hard to manage and act on and rarely does the data make it to the people that need it the most – those working with the customers.

Simplicity and fun. Hively is simple and gives you real time feedback you can act on. It helps you address customer issues immediately, thank loyal customers and instantly resolve employee training issues or motivate them with rewards. We’ve made Hively fun to use by including gaming elements that give team members points and rewards for getting positive feedback. It’s the first web based system that offers you a complete ‘closed loop’ feedback system from customer to employee.

Middle managers and executives at small – medium size businesses that need a simple solution for measuring customer happiness and motivating their employees in support, sales, training departments or any customer facing departments.

Having had success with raising outside capital with our last venture, this time around we’ve decided to bootstrap. There are pluses and minuses to this approach compare to raising money. For example, a big minus is that you can’t always go as fast as you want or do everything you want when you’re limited in funds. However, interestingly enough, that’s also one of the biggest positives. Taking a slower, more thoughtful approach has allowed us to make better, smarter decisions while also retaining all of our equity.

When you have a new product it’s critical that you listen to your customers. What’s more critical though is listening to the right things and continuing to listen. For example, some of our first customers didn’t like the gaming components of Hively and were very vocal about it. We almost changed our entire product by removing all of the gaming pieces based on this customer feedback. However, as we gained more customers we continued talking to them and found these new customers overwhelmingly loved the gaming components of Hively.

Today, the gaming aspect of Hively is probably the most unique and favorite part of the prodcut for our customers. Had we acted to soon we could have potentially made a very large mistake.

Right now we are 100% focused on getting new customers and keeping those customers engaged and happy. We’re getting ready to make a big marketing push and we’re excited to see the results. We have lots of big ideas for the application that mostly involve improving the product and making it more social, as opposed to just adding more features. We’ll see where our customers want us to take the product.