CustomerGauge Launches to Give Businesses Better Ears to Hear “Voice of Customer”

Amsterdam, 25 October 2007. Directness BV announces the launch of CustomerGauge, a new web-based software tool that uniquely helps organizations measure customer loyalty, understand customer sentiment, and respond to customer comments. CustomerGauge provides a straightforward way to automatically survey customers and measure loyalty. To ensure best practice the results are compatible with the Net Promoter® Score* (NPS), acknowledged as the industry standard for loyalty measurement. This allows companies to benchmark themselves against others in similar industries.

To help understand sentiment, CustomerGauge uniquely brings the “Vox Clientis” (Voice of the Customer) into the organization, by providing a method to quantify and classify comments. For the first time, organizations can easily convert free text comments into statistical data, and distribute feedback around the business. CustomerGauge offers various options including a real-time Comment Ticker (which shows customer sentiment on large “Flight Information” type displays).

CustomerGauge has a comprehensive response function to help organizations close the loop with customers and keep their promises. The designers found that in many companies today valuable customer comments are never acknowledged or answered, which can create further negative sentiment. To address this issue, CustomerGauge increases the productivity of marketers by providing an assisted answering template, allowing individual answers to be crafted in just a few mouse few clicks.

“As marketers, we all know how important customer loyalty is. But there are few tools available to businesses that give insight into both customer loyalty and sentiment, and as far as we know, none that make the results actionable” says Adam Dorrell, Managing Director of Directness BV, and creator of CustomerGauge. “In previous roles we had worked with spreadsheets and responded ad hoc to customer comments, but still noticed a significant improvement in loyalty. Now businesses can use CustomerGauge to replace manual reporting and respond quickly to issues - to better quantify, understand and improve customer sentiment.”

CustomerGauge is a hosted solution, and can be rapidly deployed anywhere in an organization, without investment in capital equipment or IT assistance. Designed by marketers with backgrounds in the direct sales divisions of major customer-focused companies the system has been tested in real life industry situations and is now available generally. A flash-based tour and self-guided demonstration is available on www.customergauge.com.

*Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.



About Directness:
Directness BV is a software and consulting company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Formed in 2006 by former directors of Sony and Dell, Directness assists major brands to listen, market and sell directly to consumers. For news, product and company information visit www.directness.net or call +31 629 436360.

Note for non-English editors: “Gauge” (pronounced like en-gage) is an instrument for measuring or indicating quantity.

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Contact:
Camilla E. Scholten
Directness BV
Tel +31 6 52570162
Camilla.scholten@directness.net
www.directness.net