Why GetHuman Raised Money
Nutshell: $3m in investment from Founder Collective and NextView Ventures helps us help more distressed customers.
GetHuman publishes customer service tools, tips, and tricks at gethuman.com- a website visited by over 100 million people in the last few years. We show the fastest ways to contact companies and walk you through tough customer service problems, among other things. About 9 months ago we added a new service: we solve customer service problems for you.
To the average person, customer service is messy at best. Filing a complaint or asking a simple question feels like navigating an obstacle course. The process can be confusing, starting with figuring out how to get in touch with the company. Waiting on hold is all but guaranteed- if there’s even a phone number to call. If not, you’re sending an email or submitting a “ticket” and wondering when you’ll hear back. Getting passed around to different reps is tiring, as is repeating your case again and again. For GetHuman, publishing tips and tricks on how to shortcut all of this was a good start, but not nearly enough. We want you to be able to skip all of it. That’s why we started handling your customer service problems for you from start to end.
Since we began offering the service 9 months ago, roughly 20,000 people have handed us a customer service issue to resolve. We’ve fought for refunds, canceled services, filed complaints, fixed account issues, and much more. We’ve spent nearly 8,000 hours on hold on behalf of customers. And we’ve recouped nearly $500,000 for those same customers. The feedback we’ve gotten so far ranges from warm to exuberant; customers love getting their problems solved without all the time and hassle.
“I didn’t feel like calling United about the canceled flight. I don’t like the whole confrontation thing. Rob took care of the whole mess for me. I LOVE not having to negotiate! I’m worn out by the time I get to a real live person anyways.”
While the numbers and the praise are encouraging, there is much to be done. Currently, we are only able to provide this service for a hundred or so people per day. We want to be helping the millions per day that are struggling through customer service problems- or are avoiding doing them altogether.
Thankfully, we found partners who share our deep conviction about this problem and our approach for solving it. NextView Ventures and Founder Collective want to see us expand this service to more customers and have supplied the fuel to accelerate the effort. They were joined by other hometown firms Operator.VC and Companyon, as well as California-based Correlation, OATV, and Precursor, and a few individuals that we see as our heroes and mentors.
Going forward, we’ll be able to grow our 2-person software engineering team and work on building the technology that will help us bring this service to the next hundred thousand customers in need- and eventually the millions. It won’t happen overnight, but with the help of our investors and team, we are now capable of getting there faster. And that’s really our specialty to begin with: speeding up the process. At least this time there won’t be any hold music.