STELLAService And Its Army Of Online Secret Shoppers Raise $15 Million Series B Round
Existing investors Battery Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, RRE Ventures and Forerunner Ventures all contributed to the financing.
In addition to raising the new round, STELLAService is publicly launching a paid data product that will help partnering e-commerce companies get customer service dirt on their employees, and their competitors.
"At the end of the day, many sites sell the same sort of items, and customer service becomes what makes a shopper pick one site over another," CEO Jordy Leiser tells Business Insider.
STELLAService pays thousands of mystery shoppers daily to buy items from sites like Nordstrom.com and Gilt Groupe, call customer service teams and ask questions, then return products. The mystery shoppers take detailed notes of the entire experience and rate the companies on response time, helpfulness, shipping time, and more.
All of the data they collect gets put into the new subscription data product. Smaller companies pay a few thousand dollars for either annual or semi-annual reports. Larger companies, which are tracked daily by STELLAService's mystery shoppers, pay six-figures annually for monthly customer service reports. Leiser says the data product has been in private beta for a few months, and it already has paying customers.
STELLAService will use the new revenue stream as well as the Series B financing to hire a large research team and make the data product more comprehensive. The company will also be moving its headquarters to lower Manhattan; it's a finalist in Bloomberg's "Take the Helm" initiative, which is granting STELLAService $250,000 to move its office downtown. STELLAService is a New York-based startup that has raised more than $22 million to date.