We all have experienced customer service nightmares. Often, one of the must frustrating parts of a poor customer service experience is feeling that your feedback is falling on deaf ears. Tello, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is hoping to fill this gap by offering companies a realtime feedback app that consumers can use on their mobile phones to rate customer service on the fly.
On the consumer side, Tello is a free web and mobile service that aggregates ratings for businesses (business listing are aggregated from Localeze) from across the web and allows users to post comments about their experience at a business. Users can provide feedback on specific employees, recommend an employees and share a positive or negative story about the employee.
Via iPhone and Android apps, users can select a specific business, choose and employee at the business and rate the service. For businesses, Tello provides paid-access to a dashboard that allows managers to see how their customer service reps are faring among users. Tello will rank employees based upon customer feedback, and all information is crowdsourced in real time.
Tello has raised over $1 million in seed funding from an impressive roster of well-known investors Dave McClure, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Russ Siegelman, Marc Goines, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, and Shervin Pishevar.
Q&A:
Adam Nash: Why wouldn’t I use Yelp?
Tello: Yelp is only available at certain businesses. Yelp is more focused on longer form reviews. We have a bunch of ideas around incentives. If you give a business feedback, they give you a credit towards purchases.
MT: Have you sized the market? Is this a $100M play? $10M? What about the airlines?
Tello: Thus is a multi-billion dollar market, a lot of these companies are in need of something like this.
C: Why should a users use you? Or a company?
Tello: You can let people know if they did a good or a bad job. Businesses can keep track of how their employees are doing.
AN: Figuring out how to get liquidity around individual reputation is difficult.