mSurvey, the mobile-first consumer feedback platform for businesses and consumers in Africa, today announces a Series A round of USD$3.5m, led by Africa focused venture firm TLcom Capital with investment from Social Capital, Kapor Capital, Golden Palm, and Richard Owen; founding team of Net Promoter Score (NPS).
This follows Seed Investment rounds from Cross Culture Ventures, Alpha Angels and Safaricom’s Spark Venture Fund. The investment will enable the company to continue building out its infrastructure and partnerships, in order to scale and expand into more African countries..
In an interview with Forbes, Dr. Kenfield Griffith, mSurvey co-founder and CEO mentioned a few things.
You’ve raised $3.5m from VCs including TLcom Capital – how will mSurvey be deploying this Series A raise?
This round of investment comes shortly after our launch in Nigeria and we are excited that our investors are actively supporting what we are trying to achieve, is to enable businesses of any size operating in Africa – local and international – to connect with and better understand African consumers.
We’ve seen considerable traction in Kenya, conducting over 12M conversations with consumers so far, and we’ve been able to achieve this because of strategic partnerships built with the likes of Safaricom.
With this investment, we plan to continue to build partnerships and infrastructure, in order to scale and expand into more countries on the continent, such as South Africa.
I noticed that you have also brought on board the co-founder of the Net Promoter Score [NPS] as an investor; how did that come about and how can NPS, used by most corporate brands in the West, be applied to companies across Africa?
We’re pleased to have Richard Owen, founding member of NPS, on board as an investor.
He pretty much invented customer feedback, powered by tech – so for us, he is a natural fit in terms of how we want to structure mSurvey and build relationships between businesses and customers on the continent.
Having taken the Net Promoter Score all around the world through a series of Masterclasses, and seeing how successful it has been in other emerging markets, we’ve been fortunate to work closely with Richard to be the first to bring NPS Masterclasses to Africa – in Kenya and more recently in Nigeria.
We’ve been able to accomplish a lot in our short time of working together because we share the same fundamental belief that Africa provides a unique opportunity for companies to accelerate their growth and the way to do that is by institutionalising NPS as the core metric for companies to apply.
The meet-up came about when Richard and I were discussing what mSurvey was achieving, in terms of pioneering customer feedback and leveraging this through tech and mobile. He was interested in how we were operating in emerging markets, and we just had some big conversations about the scale of the market opportunity.
Richard’s advice and insight was invaluable, and he soon went from someone who I could bounce ideas off, to a mentor, to a partner and now an investor. Together, we get to re-imagine and leapfrog customer feedback in Africa.
Considering the current media and political atmosphere regarding the acquisition of data and sensitive information, how does mSurvey fare in terms of data security?
Data privacy and security is becoming an increasingly sensitive and important issue for businesses in general, which is why it has always been a priority for us to take proactive steps to ensure that our respondents’ personal information and data remains protected.
We protect the confidentiality of our respondents’ information in accordance with our normal procedures and legal requirements, but more importantly – this is a two-way dialogue between consumer and company; the entire process is an open dialogue and customers are willing and active participants.
mSurvey was built to fundamentally create visibility and transparency between consumers and the businesses that offer them products and services.
Our goal is to create trust between the consumer and the business through the direct channel. We are trusted by respondents, because we are transparent inasmuch that the consumer wants better products and services and are eager to provide businesses the insights they need through conversation. It is amazing what the power of open conversation can achieve.
