This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Wizpra, the company that provides customer experience management (CEM) platform under the same name, announced last week that it has fundraised 230 million yen ($2 million) from Gree Ventures, Mobile Internet Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, and Mizuho Capital. Coinciding with this, Gree Ventures’ partner Tatsuki Tsutsumi and Waseda University’s business school professor Hironori Higashide has joined the board of management.

Founded in March 2013, Wizpra has been providing a user experience management platform called Wizpra NPS and an employee experience management (EEM) platform called Wizpra Card. Since its launch in August 2014, Wizpra NPS has been adopted by more than 1,000 retailers in Japan, such as restaurants and fitness gyms.

While the monthly fee for Wizpra NPS varies by number of users ranging from 100,000 yen ($850) to 350,000 yen ($3000), Wizpra Card will charge 400 yen per user to subscribing companies.

Net Promotor Score, NPS for short [1], is one of the indicators to measure customer loyalty by asking customers one simple question — How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague? They respond on a 0 to 10 rating scale and are categorized as follows:

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

It is reportedly easier for both sides of businesses and their customers to conduct and answer questionnaires thanks to the simple scoring system.

Based on this scoring system, Wizpra NPS provides an easy-to-answer questionnaire form optimized for smartphone users, as well as a dashboard for businesses showing them a real-time analysis of collected answers. Answers will be classified into three categories of promoters, passives, and detractors, improving the visibility of the analysis leveraging keywords extracted from collected responses.

Wizpra CEO Yoshimitsu Imanishi explained:

As we’ve seen that Apple has adopted Medallia, many companies are using NPS as the most important KPI (key performance index) in the US.

Imanishi has experience as in employee management and customer management in his career, starting as an account executive at Hitachi, followed by a stint as a Uniqlo store manager.

Imanishi continued:

What’s good about NPS is that it’s directly linked with a sales performance. We have received feedback of retailers using our service, noting that it can visualize their customer’s voice and help them consider how they should deal with customers upon their next visit to storefronts according to how high or low their loyalty is.

In this way, their user base has quickly grown to 1,000 retailers in just six months since the launch. They said that business categories of their users are also being diversified.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by Masaru Ikeda and Kurt Hanson
Proofread by “Tex” Pomeroy