StellaService offers Stella Connect, a SaaS people-success platform that provides real-time customer feedback, recognition, and rewards to enable on-the-spot microcoaching and friendly competition via leaderboards. The product integrates with major CRM platforms such as Zendesk. Led by co-founder and CEO Jordy Leiser, the company serves hundreds of brands across industries including retail, financial services, travel, healthcare, and automotive. Clients named in the article include Brooklinen, Earnin, Sam’s Club, Williams‑Sonoma, Jet.com and PowerReviews. The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations. StellaService gathers customer-service performance data for retail and e-commerce companies by hiring hundreds of shoppers to make purchases and returns across the U.S. and U.K. and tracking metrics such as delivery times, refund speed and response times via phone and email. It licenses data to Google (used in AdWords five-star ratings and merchant profile pages) and sells access to performance data to clients — the site lists customers including Walmart and Abercrombie — with clients paying on average over $100,000 a year. The company is piloting a program to measure in-store customer service tied to online purchases and returns. StellaService is not yet profitable but reported revenue growth of more than 100 percent last year and has around 70 full-time employees. The company plans to use new funding to build new products, expand further into brick-and-mortar store measurement and enter new geographies, and is in discussions to measure companies in industries beyond retail. StellaService measures and benchmarks customer service performance of online businesses using a nationwide network of anonymous, paid mystery shoppers and by purchasing products itself for evaluation. It combines shopper data with analyses from an internal team and says its evaluation process is audited annually by KPMG; the company does not accept payments for ratings. StellaService assigns ratings ranging from “elite” to lower tiers, offers a paid “seal of approval” to top performers, and sells access to its underlying data. In 2012 the company produced 3.9 million data points and says it currently has about 700 seal partners, with roughly 5 percent qualifying as “elite.” The company has developed Stella Metrics, a SaaS data platform that was deployed to a few charter partners and is now being made generally available. New capital will be used to deploy and scale Stella Metrics nationally, expand coverage, and grow its research and client services teams. STELLAService provides independent customer-service ratings for online retailers by having analysts purchase products and test the end-to-end shopping and support experience. Analysts collect data across multiple touchpoints, produce ratings ranging from "elite" to lower tiers, and publish those ratings on the site. Retailers that earn "elite" or "excellent" ratings receive a STELLA seal of approval to display. The service is used by companies including Zappos, 1800Flowers, Wine.com, 1800Contacts, Gilt Groupe, and GNC, and the number of retailers using the service grew tenfold since April. Founded in 2009, STELLAService sells ratings and marketing services to online retailers and uses its testing methodology as the core product. The company plans to use the new capital to aggressively grow the business, build out its team, and ramp up product development. STELLAService evaluates online retailers' customer service and publishes ratings to help shoppers make informed purchasing decisions and help retailers improve. The company employs trained customer-experience analysts who purchase products and thoroughly test the thousands of companies it evaluates. Its customer portfolio includes known e-retailers such as Diapers.com, Zappos.com and 1-800-Flowers.com. STELLAService was founded in 2009. The startup announced a $2 million early-stage funding round and said it will use the capital to step up development of its customer service evaluation system. It also plans to expand its website with new tools and features to make it more comprehensive for online shoppers.

Total raised

$48M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Mar 2019