On paper, TruRating comes off like yet another London startup filling a tiny niche in the ever-expanding payments space, a bit player vying for a small sliver of a crowded market.
But after a few minutes with its ambitious founder, Georgina Nelson, it’s easier to be convinced that one second of a customer’s time, multiplied over thousands of experiences, can provide valuable data that helps companies make better decisions. And it’s much clearer that Ms. Nelson believes her simple idea can transform commerce and underpin a scalable business.
“I want the world,” Ms. Nelson told Global Atlanta with a smile but no hint of bluster.
And her actions back it up. Already with 50-plus employees in offices spread throughout London, Sydney and Toronto, the company has just opened a new base in Atlanta as it seeks to take on the mammoth task of cracking the U.S. payments market. It’s got a few things going for it: key partnerships with Atlanta-based Global Payments and other merchant acquirers in Europe, as well as France-based hardware giant Ingenico, which has a local office here.
A day before the interview, TruRating announced its latest funding round: a $12.6 million Series A raise led by Sandaire, bringing total funding to nearly $20 million. Early rounds included payments heavy-hitters like the former head of Visa Europe and now TruRating board Chairman Peter Ayliffe.
TruRating’s premise isn’t earth-shattering: It integrates with payment-processing software to gather customer feedback at the point of sale. Customers are asked to rate service, atmosphere or some other aspect of their experience on a scale of 0-9, with 9 representing the top mark. It all happens during idle time on the payment terminal, and it’s limited to one question per transaction to avoid adding undue friction to the process.
It’s the resulting knowledge, combined with customer spend data from the transaction, that provides the real value. Now, companies from small restaurants to major retailers with household names (soon, Ms. Nelson promises) can view real-time feedback on how they’re doing in the eyes of customers and adjust operations accordingly. Feedback is displayed in an online dashboard used by single locations or by head offices can use to monitor progress across multiple outlets.
For instance, one popular London pizza chain, Franco Manca, saw food scores drop in one location around 4 p.m. each day. Come to find out, cooks were adjusting oven temperature around that time to save on energy. The feedback helped fix a problem that could have taken weeks to discern without it, Ms. Nelson said.
One London location of another Italian chain, Carluccio’s, was being scolded by its head office for poor customer ratings on Yelp and TripAdvisor. The owner insisted it was a few trolls seeking free meals — not a representative sample of hundreds of happy customers. He resorted to leaving stamped letters on tables asking them to send in positive feedback to corporate. No one obliged.
It’s this frustration that TruRating hopes to solve for retailers, eventually taking on the giants of the American online consumer ratings space with a system that it says provides much more frequent — and thus, accurate — look at consumer preferences. TruRating claims to offer verified ratings from actual customers rather than, say, a disgruntled former employee. The core questions cover five key benchmarks, tied to real transactions. So far, nine out of 10 customers are participating in outlets where the technology is deployed.
“The silent majority never says anything,” says Ms. Nelson, citing what she’s come to know as the 99-1 rule in this space: 99 percent remain quiet and 1 percent make just about all the noise.
Brands can also provide their own custom questions to the terminal to do A/B testing of a marketing campaign or new store layout before rolling it out across their system. They can bounce their benchmark ratings against others in their sector — a Tex-Mex restaurant can see how its food scores stack up against local competitors, for instance.
Ms. Nelson, a lawyer by training, realized the system was broken while working at Which?, a London nonprofit that helps consumers make informed choices about products.
But the three years or so between conception and securing a global footprint, a reliable technology platform, solid financial backing and a critical mass of ratings (exceeding 2 million, set to expand exponentially with new partnerships, she says) were not easy.
“It’s taken time to build that evidence,” she said. “Before, it was me traipsing around the payments shows like, ‘Please speak to me! Do you like it? Do you like it?’ and now we have huge [merchant] acquirers coming to us saying, ‘We want this.'”
A key early move was bringing on Pete Salmon, a technology lead with a payments background, luring him with equity in the company.
Then, she hit the pavement to tackle the chicken-and-egg problem of getting giant merchant acquirers like Atlanta-based Global Payments to integrate software from a startup into their highly secure systems — a requirement before small retailers and restaurants would pay for the service.
“You’re essentially launching something in the most secure environment, in which all these companies’ bread and butter relies on the fact that these payments always work,” she said.
Now, she’s hiring for multiple positions in the city she’s chosen to be her home for the U.S. market — and looking to work with payments giants like WorldPay, another U.K. firm with its American base in Atlanta.
Ms. Nelson says the company has a long way to go before its final destination — indicating that she’ll be affiliated with Atlanta for awhile yet.
“At the moment, in all honesty, I don’t think about exit. We would be selling ourselves short if we don’t go and prove all that we think will happen can happen, and every day we get more proof points. There’s nothing so far that has suggested we won’t do that.”
She Chose ATL
Ms. Nelson is the posterchild for everything Atlanta’s tech scene knows about itself and is desperately trying to show to the world. She’s a young CEO in a fast-moving tech sector who balances dreams of startup success on a global scale with the responsibilities of raising a 3-year-old daughter.
[pullquote]”Atlanta’s got this energy and creativity, that everyone is carving it out for themselves — it’s like people have figured out this is what the good life is.”[/pullquote]
And she came upon the city organically, without being wooed by the entreaties from polished marketing campaigns. She chose Atlanta without hearing of ChooseATL; she ended up in the middle of Transaction Alley without knowing what the region had begun calling itself.
Her first impression of Atlanta was that, yes, it was a hub for payments activity — but living here?
“I spoke to some of my parents’ friends, and they were just talking about getting in their car to go everywhere, and I was thinking, ‘This isn’t going to be that much fun,’” she said.
It was the founders of another Atlanta startup, Cardlytics — Lynne Laube and Scott Grimes — who showed her the charm of intown neighborhoods and the city’s overall potential as a livable, affordable and well-connected metropolis where she could live out her dreams of American market dominance.
They took her to Krog Bar, just off the Atlanta Beltline in Old Fourth Ward, and it’s safe to say one of the city’s hottest locales made an impression: Now she’s renting a newly built apartment next door to the bar and across the street from the Krog St. Market. The TruRatings office is just up the Beltline off Ralph McGill Boulevard, allowing her to walk to work when she’s in town.
She gets wistful when describing how the city’s charm provides the urban character and neighborhood feel she loves about London and other cities — at a fraction of the cost of San Francisco or New York.
“Atlanta, especially in the area where we are, it’s got this energy and creativity that everyone is carving it out for themselves. I love that, and just the walk we do to work down the Beltline, where you’re walking past art installations and every boring bit of bridge is covered in something to make you smile — it’s like people have figured out this is what the good life is.”
Learn more about TruRating job opportunities here, which provide five weeks of mandatory vacation.