Our investment in HappySignals: putting employee happiness at the core of digital transformation
It’s a problem that we all know and loathe. You’re trying to do some work for an important deadline or connect to a call when an IT problem gets in the way, or perhaps the legacy system from the last millennium slows everything down. The word “frustration” does not truly cover just how infuriating it is when these problems rear their ugly heads; I’ve even heard a story from someone (who prefers to remain nameless!) destroying a printer because of this frustration, reminiscent of the famous scene from the 1999 film Office Space
These problems are extremely emotive, but emotions are difficult to quantify and it’s tempting to ask “what’s the real-world impact on people’s work?” Well, on average, an employee loses ~3 hours of work to each IT ticket and submits 8 tickets per year (1). That equates to almost 250,000 hours of work lost to IT tickets each year for an enterprise with 10k employees. and that’s just the impact that can be quantified…
“On average, an employee loses 3 hours of work to each IT ticket”
This is the problem that HappySignals seeks to end. Their aim is to help IT departments move from Output metrics (how many tickets were closed or how quickly they were closed) to a combination of Outcome and Experience metrics (the experience and outcome that the end-user received). This helps to answer questions like:
“Did IT even solve the problem or just close the ticket?”
The HappySignals Employee Experience Management Platform allows IT teams to collect and share data continuously on their service and infrastructure using lightning-quick and laser-focused employee surveys that are ready-made to collect data on the time lost and frustration caused by IT problems (or happiness and productivity as HappySignals calls them). This is combined with operational and ticket data to give IT teams an extremely rich and deep real-time data source that allows them to make data-driven decisions and provide reliable and effective IT, making happier and more productive employees. The platform also allows IT teams to follow a growing trend of setting and meeting experience level targets, with Experience Level Agreements instead of regular Service Level Agreements (SLAs), giving IT, partners and vendors a common goal.
“HappySignals is to IT teams what a CRM is to Sales teams”
CIO, Campari Group
And it’s as simple as it is effective! On average customers saw a 26% increase in productivity and a 21% improvement in employee experience, or happiness, with their IT.
At Nauta Capital, we are delighted to be leading a €4.7m Series A investment in the HappySignals, with participation from their previous investors Vendep Capital. There are a lot of things about the company that impressed us, but here is a short summary of why we invested:
- Capital efficient growth: Nauta’s thesis is centred around Capital Efficiency and when we saw at what HappySignals have achieved with their team and limited funding to date we were amazed. We are excited to see what they can achieve with the additional funding
- A real pain point with strong supporting market trends: as well as the very real pain point for end-users, the need for HappySignals’ product is supported by wider industry trends where Experience Level Agreements are helping IT service providers and MSPs in delivering better service and guiding digital transformation
- An exceptional and experienced team: the team’s experience in IT service design, software and building companies is extremely impressive, but more than that, we heard time and time again from customers that:
“working with HappySignals is incredibly easy”
- A sticky product with extremely high customer retention: customers are also resoundingly positive about the product and its impact, with retention statistics to support. Combined with an established sales engine this creates a very resilient business that showed its strengths while growing through an extended period of global lockdown
- Immediate growth prospects: The company has huge expansion opportunities, with early traction in the US and a developing MSP sales channel. One person even said of them:
“our Nirvana would be installing HappySignals with every single client user”
- Low direct substitutes in competitive set: generic survey tools run in-house are the only potential competitors which do not share most of the core functionality and simply don’t solve the problems
It’s been a pleasure working with the HappySignals team and, as Carles Ferrer joins the company’s board of directors, we look forward to being part of their journey from here onwards!
Sources and references:
- HappySignals experience management platform benchmark data called Happiness Score™, based on Q3/2020 results from 936.955 responses from IT end-users. (this is just scratching the surface of the data that their product collects and the insights it can generate)
https://www.happysignals.com/happiness-score/
