Q°emotion, the startup using emotions to bring the customer experience back to life

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Our emotions are fundamental to our human relationships, whether personal (family, social) or professional (brand and consumer relations). Convinced of that, Grégoire Pfirsch and Matthieu Bruneteau de Gorsse also observed that there was no simple, fast solution for decoding and understanding the emotions felt by a customer or an employee.

That is the reason Q°emotion exists, a startup founded in 2015. A passion for technology and for emotions brought us together.

More detail with Grégoire Pfirsch, co-founder of Q°emotion:

FrenchWeb: What need does your service meet?

Our SaaS solution Q°emotion speeds up customer relations and brings the customer experience back to life. Q°emotion's artificial intelligence algorithms analyse, classify and prioritise every kind of written customer message by detecting the emotions felt. Three examples:

• If a company receives many customer messages (emails, for instance) and needs to speed up how they are handled or assigned: it needs Q°emotion.
• If, within a large volume of customer reviews (online reviews, comments), a company wants to detect risky situations or commercial opportunities as a priority: it needs Q°emotion.
• If a company wants to understand and automatically classify thousands of verbatim responses from surveys or customer feedback: it needs Q°emotion.

What is your value proposition?

The Q°emotion solution puts artificial intelligence at the service of analysing the emotions customers feel, through a SaaS platform and APIs.

Q°emotion's promise is twofold:

1. Personalise and bring the customer experience back to life: by detecting emotions in a customer journey, contextualising them (NLP and semantic classification) and identifying very precisely what delights and what disappoints (the irritants), so that customer actions can be more empathetic.

2. Speed up customer relations by making the adviser's or agent's life simpler: by prioritising incoming messages (through the emotion detected and its intensity), assigning them to the right department (through the reason or semantic subject) and recommending an empathetic reply template.

Two examples of the value it brings:

• For an airline: Q°emotion reduces customer churn by bringing to light a critical pain point in the travel journey so that it can be put right. How? For instance by detecting the emotional tones of "fear and disgust" caused by a food item present on breakfast meal trays.
• For a French banking group, Q°emotion speeds up the handling of incoming emails by 25% and improves its quality. How? For instance by detecting the emotional intensity of incoming messages in order to prioritise them. The result: the adviser is helped to concentrate on the most important and urgent messages, while being given the information needed for a more empathetic reply.

Who uses your solutions?

The Q°emotion solution is used mainly by the marketing, digital, customer relations, research and data science departments of large groups and mid-caps, in France and internationally (the solution is multilingual). Q°emotion is deployed mainly in tourism and transport, luxury and cosmetics, retail and distribution, and banking and insurance.

What is your growth plan?

Over the next two years:

• maintain annual growth of +400%.
• prepare a Series A round in 2019
• open new offices in Europe and pass 75% of projects being international.
• triple our headcount while preserving our human values of humility, trust and consideration.

What are your challenges?

Becoming the leader in our market:

• by recruiting and growing our teams sustainably around our values and around data scientist, business development and customer success skills.
• by increasing our international growth (product, client projects, team)

Who are your competitors?

Our direct competitors are the players in the affective computing market (companies using technology to decode emotions), and more specifically those in the cognitive computing segment (a market worth 13 billion dollars by 2020): emotion detection through NLP (semantic analysis), through facial or voice recognition, through IoT (connected wristbands, for instance) and through neuromarketing. Our indirect competitors are the players in semantic analysis, text mining and text analytics.

Which entrepreneur inspires you? Why?

Thomas Pesquet, for the unique personal destiny he has achieved and for the "dream" he was willing to share with us.

The 5 apps you cannot do without, and why:

• Here and Citymapper: for my international and city travel
• Tennis Addict and Spotify: for my leisure time ☺
• WhatsApp and Slack: for instant and collaborative exchanges

The 5 tech events you absolutely must attend, and why:

• Big data, AI and Vivatechnology shows: for the quality of the network and the richness of the conversations
• TED talks: for the quality of the content

A startup you would like us to discover?

• Quitoque.fr: for the great variety and fine quality of its little dishes to prepare, which give my weeks their rhythm ☺

The key facts:

• Founders: Grégoire Pfirsch and Matthieu Bruneteau de Gorsse
• Founded: 8 June 2015
• Funding: June 2017 – 800K€ (seed)
• Headquarters: Technopole de l'Aube en Champagne, 2 rue Gustave Eiffel, Rosières-près-Troyes, and premises at Gare de Lyon within the Welcome City Lab.

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[FW Radar] Q°emotion, the startup using emotions to bring the customer experience back to life