FullStory nabs $103M for consumer knowledge analytics

FullStory, a consumer knowledge analytics corporation, today announced it has closed a $103 million series D round led by Permira, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Salesforce Ventures, and other folks. The startup says the new capital, which brings its valuation to $1.8 billion and total funding to $170 million, will be used to expand its business enterprise internationally and boost its digital knowledge observability platform.

Dead hyperlinks, unsubmittable types, failed scheduling tools, rejected vouchers, and other flaws, bugs, and glitches can litter companies’ internet sites. Not only do these present barriers to buying, working, banking, and travel, they can lead to overwhelmed consumer service teams, employees shortages, and hours-lengthy wait occasions. That’s essential, contemplating 89% of shoppers are more probably to make a further acquire immediately after a positive consumer service knowledge than a damaging one, according to Salesforce.

FullStory, which was founded in 2014, aims to support businesses create improved experiences across net and mobile channels by delivering analytics and insights to item, consumer good results, engineering, and promoting teams. It’s the brainchild of students at the Georgia Institute of Technology who teamed up in the 2000s at a DevOps startup (later acquired by Google) and became the founding members of the Google Atlanta workplace.

“[The students built a] platform that was originally conceived as a marketing collaboration tool. When the original idea didn’t pan out, the team created an analytics tool to understand why the product wasn’t resonating, [which became FullStory],” FullStory CEO Scott Voigt told VentureBeat by means of e-mail. “They knew the answers to their product value prop questions were resident in their app’s data. But it was clear that existing paradigms for data collection and analysis were deeply flawed. Event instrumentation, required by every analytics solution on the market, meant that users needed the foresight to identify something as an important moment, tag it, and analyze it. That resulted in endless blind spots, as product managers and designers realized over and over they’d forgotten to tag something they’d never thought users would interact with.”

Deep analytics

Leaving their original thought behind, FullStory’s Atlanta, Georgia-based group set its sights on creating a new method to consumer knowledge analytics. Instead of relying on predetermined events and tagging, they constructed a platform that collects, structures, and analyzes digital knowledge information and utilizes machine understanding to glean insights into behaviors.

“FullStory is the only company to taglessly collect, structure, and analyze the most comprehensive digital experience data. This is a foundational advantage, and this is where we unlock value for the [market] category,” Voigt stated. “The FullStory platform makes it extremely easy to ingest instrumented event data for a company … But the platform goes far beyond traditional analytics to also capture all unstructured data that companies simply couldn’t collect before. This includes the full context of the visit, as well as every interaction on the site.”

FullStory tracks heuristics and signals like highlights, scroll depths, pinch-to-zoom frequency, and “copy and paste,” which supplies a way to have an understanding of if a particular person is comparison buying or searching up a term in search. The platform can combine groups of equivalent user interface states across sessions to understand and create a model of the a variety of pages and screens of a site. It can also search via a variety of feasible “friction events” to see how frequently they correlate with a failure to convert, applying statistical modeling strategies and logic to estimate how numerous lost conversions may well have been recovered if the friction had been avoided.

“FullStory uses big data infrastructure to … assist with automatic suggestions and contextual comparisons, visualizations, and communications,” Voigt explained. “Once issues are diagnosed, saved reports and automated alerts allow teams to track progress, monitor future incidents, and continually learn and optimize together. Clients can also automatically pull FullStory’s enriched data into their own data science research and analytics — e.g., via API call or webhook — to create rich insights that inject customer empathy into new processes and operations.”

The pandemic — and companies’ subsequent embrace of digital experiences — has been a boon for FullStory, which had its ideal quarter ever in Q2 2021, with a record quantity of seven-figure offers and 70% year-more than-year annual recurring income development. Despite competitors from startups like Decibel and Glassbox, the corporation, which has more than 300 staff, now serves more than 3,000 customers, like Omni Hotels, Financial Times, Peloton, Fidelity, and JetBlue.

Voigt says a home improvement consumer made use of information from FullStory to determine a spike in the sale of garage mats early in the pandemic. A deeper evaluation revealed that the very same shoppers had been obtaining other gear constant with constructing home gyms. Based on this, the corporation updated its merchandising and promoting components to capitalize on the trend.

“The influx of new digital customers and new patterns of behavior requires brands to intimately understand the nuances of their customers’ behavior, including the blind spots, frustrations, and stumbles they experience on their digital journey. These nuances lie outside the reach of traditional analytics solutions and can only be effectively addressed by a joint effort across enterprise functions,” Voigt added. “Overall, companies’ increased focus on the importance of digital experience intelligence has been a tailwind … FullStory will analyze more than 15 billion user sessions in 2021, [which] includes analysis of nearly 1 trillion interactions, like clicks, navigations, highlights, scrolls, and frustration signals.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz