With four million customers around the world enacting over seven million transactions a day, Betfair provides an ever evolving portfolio of innovative products including its betting Exchange, casino, exchange games and poker. Mariana Silva Southern, Customer Experience Research Manager at Betfair.com says of UserZoom, “There’s no one else in the market that can give us what we need.”

UserZoom provides an innovative range of UX tools & services, which matches Betfair’s needs and future developments, especially for remote customer testing across new platforms. While rich information can be gathered when users are put in front of a prototype and interviewed on a one-to-one basis, this activity can be very expensive and can typically only cover a small number of users. While Silva Southern says that Betfair continues to run these in-depth contextual interviews, she says, “UserZoom gives us a way to reach a wider audience on a one-to-one task based approach.”

Silva Southern says, “We’re constantly evolving and innovating, so we have a constant need to find out what our customers think.” She continued, “We design things in house and test. UserZoom allows us to reach a wider audience and is very useful when we need to launch something quickly. Customer feedback is the best way to get things right – we can script something and send it out for testing immediately.” She believes that optimisation is fundamental – nothing is perfect when launched but the UX tools enable Betfair to optimise quickly. What the UserZoom toolkit ensures is that product decisions are informed by customers’ needs and wants.

It was the flexibility and cost-effective nature of the licensing deal offered by UserZoom that saw Betfair sign up for a further two years. Silva Southern says, “The flexibility that UserZoom provides is a benefit – we licence not per study but per year – which means that while we have to prioritise, we can address everything that we need. By having the ongoing contract we can change any product or feature and sense check without having to worry about the economics.” She continued, “No one else competes at that level yet and we don’t expect to see it, at least for the next couple of years.”

Silva Southern said, “We love the tools because they help us understand our customers’ views on ease of use, success at performing, perceived effort, perceived time and satisfaction with the task.” At the same time, the UserZoom tool-kit enables Betfair to add other non-task based questions such as card sorting, tree testing, click image testing, timeout testing, A/B testing and multi-media feedback providing a complement to other data. Silva Southern says, “UserZoom lets us do qualitative and quantitative research, which sits well with internal stakeholders. It saves time and money, helping us to do more with less.”

Silva Southern also points out that the UserZoom tool set is very useful as an internal persuader. By enabling a quantitative approach to what many see as solely qualitative research, a more rigorous approach to the impact of UX can be made. Benchmarking studies can help the company create more effective products. And with anecdotal industry evidence showing significant financial impact through changes in language and design, setting baselines and tracking the ROI of changes on the customer could contribute significantly to the bottom line.

Arthur Moan, UK Managing Director at UserZoom says; “Having Betfair commit to a further two years having been a client of UserZoom for the past year is fantastic news and a testament to the innovation and excellent support we extend to our clients. Research is a people business, our tools offer automation of data collection and the power to reach out and collect statistically significant and highly actionable insights, however; providing strategic support and assistance on how best to utilise the methodologies we apply is key – hence our enterprise renewal rate is maintained above 90%! Betfair know UX, what they wish to achieve and in my opinion are way ahead of the game on the UX maturity that the industry is seeing. We continue to innovate and the mobile space is a huge growth area for UserZoom, clients like Betfair feed requirements into our R&D which we truly appreciate. We look forward to further strengthening our relationship over the next two years and we hope way beyond this.

About UserZoom (www.userzoom.co.uk & www.userzoom.com)

UserZoom is the leading SaaS (Software as a Service) company specialising in online user experience research & customer insights. They help businesses optimise User Experience of web-based products and mobile apps, providing them with a proprietary software solution to self serve and cost-effectively manage and conduct remote unmoderated usability testing, VoC (Voice of Customer) programs and web development projects. The UserZoom platform of research tools is the most versatile and comprehensive on-demand solution for User Experience research in the market. most versatile and comprehensive on-demand solution for User Experience research in the ma

UserZoom works with many of the Forbes Global 2000 brands across all major industries in 15 countries and has increased enterprise accounts 300% in the last year. In fact 45% of Fortune Magazine’s 50 most admired companies (e.g. Google, Paypal, IBM) use UserZoom’s solution.

Source: userzoom.com

Nearly 20% of company’s sales are generated through social networks. Oooferton expects to maintain this rate of growth in 2012 and finish the year with the increases of over 250%. The key factors that can help achieve desired results are not only introducing two new kinds of products: Gourmet and Jewelry to the existing categories but also the expansion into new international markets such as Italy, Turkey and Portugal.

This increase in sales was largely due to Oooferton’s focus on the social networks as a sales channel. Currently, the company has over 195,000 fans on its Facebook page, compared to the 35,000 in 2010. Sales derived from this network have already reached 20% of the company’s total turnover in 2011.

The dynamic of social networking has become one of the keys to Oooferton’s growth: the company constantly keeps consumers informed of the daily deals and discounts, which can reach up to 80% off of the retail price. Oooferton also launches exclusive promotions only for its fans. In addition, the success of the television advertising campaign, developed during the year, strengthened the process of sales and assured the recognition of the company.

Last year, Oooferton sent more than 120,000 products to its Spanish customers, a figure that only confirms that the business model of the platform is attractive to consumers in times of crisis. A differentiating factor, over other e-commerce companies, is the effectiveness of its processes that enables the Oooferton team to manage this volume of transactions with only 19 people while offering the best service to its customers.

Oooferton uses created by the company software that controls in an integrated way all of these areas: receipt of the merchandise, location, replenishment, inventory, shipping and customer service.

In 2011, this live-shopping platform received more than 8 million visitors and recorded more than 40 million page views. Oooferton registers a new user every 9 seconds.

New categories and markets in 2012

Oooferton started the year with great news and it hopes to keep these positive growth rates in the future. Since February 2012, the platform offers two new product categories, Gourmet & Jewelry, in addition to the three daily deals in Electronics, Entertainment and Fashion and special promotions from their Outlet.

The purchase of food products on the Internet is becoming a new trend and, with their offers, Oooferton aims to be a leader in this new niche market. The category of Jewelry has also been successful with some of their “ooofertones”(good deals): the platform sold hundreds of pearl earrings in 24 hours.

With the addition of these new categories and other improvements in the platform, Oooferton’s CEO, Luis Krug, hopes to maintain its growth rate in 2012: “Our expectations are to grow 250% this year and we are preparing our expansion into other markets, including prioritized Italy, Turkey and Portugal.”

About Oooferton

Oooferton is the first platform of live-shopping in Spain and a leader in the field of e-commerce. Founded in May 2009 by Luis Krug, a natural born entrepreneur, since its foundation, the company has shown an unstoppable growth which was considered very attractive to investors. The company has the support of one of the leading international venture capital companies in Spain, Active Venture Partners, which became a shareholder in 2010.

Oooferton is an open platform. Clients do not need to register in order to see the promotions of the new products launched every day in Electronics, Entertainment, Fashion, Gourmet and Jewels. The company headquarters is in Mogoda (Barcelona) and his staff has 19 employees covering all operational functions.

David is a Strategic Business Advisor, with more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur and managing executive of technology companies.

With a strong trans-Atlantic and pan-European focus, Dave has active clients in both the US and Europe. He mentors entrepreneurs and helps them develop business plans that accelerate revenue growth and/or external infusion of capital. Dave has been involved in more than 10 transactions involving the purchase, sale, merger, or infusion of capital into companies. He has assisted in trans-Atlantic expansion initiatives, including legal and accounting logistics, sales and marketing plans, as well as funding for two of these companies.

Dave is the founder of the pan-European CEO Collaborative Forum (CEO-CF), an exclusive consortium of high-performing CEO peer groups from high growth companies across the European Union.

In 1979, Dave founded and served as CEO of a privately held software development company in Washington, DC, USA, area until the company was acquired by a systems integrator in 1996. During his tenure, the company was recognized as one of the Inc. 500 fastest growing US companies.

As a guest lecturer at the MBA level, Dave has provided instruction at many European universities, including INSEAD University in Fontainebleau, France, London Business School, England, IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, University of Chicago, USA, and ESADE University in Barcelona, Spain.

He has also presented at the Europe’s 500 Conference and taught courses on entrepreneurship for the European Commission, BBVA, and Terra Lycos in Spain.

Christian has 15 years of business angel, venture capital and private equity experience.

In 1997 he joined 3i, a leading international private equity and venture capital group, and subsequently ran the regional office in Stuttgart, managing a large portfolio of companies and heading 3i’s German venture capital group. As a senior partner, Christian was a member of the global venture investment committee and led numerous investments, IPO’s and trade exits. These included Interhyp AG (online mortgage broker – IPO Frankfurt), BuyVIP (online private sales – sold to Amazon), Element5 (e-commerce solution – sold to Digital River), Firstgate (online payment – sold to Deutsche Telekom), Demand Media (online social media – IPO NYSE), Nanogate AG (nanotechnology – IPO Frankfurt) and Arpida AG (pharma / anti-infectives – IPO Zurich). In 2010 Christian sold his family’s gas sensor business, and since 2008 he has been an active business angel investor focussing on digital media.

Prior to joining 3i, Christian spent several years as a consultant with Andersen and Zenit, working in the R&D and marketing departments of industrial companies, as well as for the European Commission. He started his career at the German Cancer Centre in Heidelberg.

Christian was born in Germany and has lived and worked in Germany, the UK, Italy and Belgium.

Christian holds a Masters degree in Physics from the Fridericiana University, Karlsruhe, Germany as well as a Diploma in International Affairs from The Johns Hopkins University, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Bologna, Italy.

Existing partners, la Caixa through Caixa Capital Fund TiC, Cabiedes & Partners, Perennius, Aniol and XMS also participated in this investment. This financing round is aimed to enhance the company’s product development and to continue its’ international expansion.

Zyncro is a Corporate Social Network for businesses, which combines corporate communications, documents and people within companies and helps to improve their productivity, sales, CRM, and team management. In addition, it reduces the amount of emails and cuts the costs involved in the information processing and document management. The company is based in Barcelona and began its’ activities in 2008 within the Inspirit Group and was spun out as an independent company in 2010. During 2011, Zyncro has accelerated its international expansion by opening offices in Mexico, Italy and Japan. Today, this corporate social network is translated into 6 languages, including Japanese and soon, German.

The founder and managing partner of Active Venture Partners, Ricard Söderberg, emphasizes that the business of “Zyncro clearly represents the new trend in social networking for companies that follows Facebook.” According to Active, “Zyncro is a reference in the Enterprise 2.0 segment, as a Corporate Social Network it improves internal collaboration and manages the information within the companies”. Active Venture Partners states that they have known the company for quite some time. Also, both the founder of Zyncro and the CEO, Dídac Lee and Luis Font respectively, are well known to the venture capital fund, which considers them to be among the best entrepreneurs in Spain.

Dídac Lee has sought to evaluate this new round of financing with the following words: “It is a great satisfaction for us to be trusted by such prestigious professionals. I am very happy with the participation of Active Venture Partners, which is, in my opinion, one of the most professional investors in our country. Furthermore, there is nothing better for an entrepreneur than to watch his project grow and be accepted by the market.”

“Social network for businesses”
Status: Current
Sector: Social Networking
Geography: Spain
Contacts: Ricard Söderberg

ZYNCRO is a provider of a corporate social network focused on internal collaboration and knowledge management. These services include microblogging, file management, task management, people directory, ZyncroApps, work groups, segmented search and integrations, all in a single platform. Zyncro optimizes and reduces email use and the costs spent on information processing and document management. It integrates with almost any company software and can be accessed anywhere through any pc, mac or mobile device.

zyncro.com

“Human contact online”
Status: Current
Sector: Software
Geography: Spain
Contacts: Blair MacLaren

WHISBI has the technology that permits end-users to communicate via telephone whilst seeing a video of the call centre advisor on his browser in real time. It enables interactive sessions through voice, video, chat, and data interchange systems with no need for any download, plug-in or additional hardware. Their solutions are based on a worldwide patented technology, and humanise and simplify the process of selling services and products such as insurance, banking, telephones, telecommunications, among others.

whisbi.com

The investment of the venture capital firm Active Venture Partners will facilitate the growth outside of Spain. Operating since 2009, Whisbi has achieved break even and profitability in only two years. Thanks to the worldwide patented technology, the company is able to triple the sales in the Internet sales channel by optimizing e-commerce processes. The company’s clients include large corporations from the banking, insurance and telecommunication sectors.

Whisbi has managed to humanize the online sales process, which allows its clients to triple their sales through the its’ online channels. The Spanish company based in Madrid and Barcelona offers a personalized customer service in real time by the use of video calls. A sales agent, previously trained to be an expert in the online sales, assists customers all the way through the transaction process during interactive sessions with voice, video, chat, and data exchange systems using only a computer and either a landline or a mobile phone. This solution, based on a worldwide patented technology, simplifies the process of selling services and products such as insurance, banking, telephones, telecommunications, etc.

Nearly one million people have already used the online communication channel designed by Whisbi in order to purchase services and products.

The company was founded by Alex Bisbe, CEO, and Jose Luis Cantero, CTO, and among the companies that are using its technology we can find Movistar, Mutua Madrileña, Citibank, Ibanesto.com, Iberdrola and ICU.

In 2011, Whisbi reported a 165% growth in sales. The company currently employs more than 60 people directly as well as 40 indirect employees. Whisbi aims to report a 14 million euros turnover in 2012 and hire another 30 employees.

Looking abroad

The consolidation of the company after two years of its activity made the founding partners decide that the company’s next step will be its international expansion. To face this next stage, Whisbi has received the support from the venture capital firm Active Venture Partners, its first institutional investor to enter as shareholder. Active Venture Partners specializes in technology companies that have a clear vision of internationalization. Active currently has two investment funds with total commitments of 50 million euros.

The CEO and co-founder of Whisbi, Alex Bisbe, got in touch with Active Venture Partners through Evisa Group, specialized in this type of financial intermediation, and assures that “the choice of Active Venture Partners, among other candidates, will provide us with proactivity and its continued advice, together with the experience and the possibilities it can offer worldwide. We were also very impressed with how fast the investment was made after having our first contact with the Active team.”

The managing partner of Active Venture Partners, Blair MacLaren, ensures that “Whisbi has all the requirements that made us decide to invest in this company, a professional team with innovative and entrepreneurial approach, providing services with leading technology, a solid clients portfolio and a great potential for growth and international expansion”

Whisbi will be preparing its international expansion with a particular focus on Latin America and Europe, especially the United Kingdom and Germany. They also have plans to open an office in the United States.

“Book a table online”
Status: Current
Sector: Online booking
Geography: Spain
Contacts: Blair MacLaren

RESTALO is the owner of the website www.restalo.es. It is an internet based restaurant guide that allows users to make online reservations in real time for restaurants in the main Spanish cities and, to a lesser extent, other European cities. Users can find detailed information about each restaurant, including user reviews, on the website and take advantage of exclusive discounts of between 10% and 70% offered to Restalo’s users by the restaurants. The company also provides booking management systems and couponing to restaurants.

restalo.es

Restalo.es was founded in late 2008 in Barcelona and is led by four young entrepreneurs with extensive experience of the sector and of providing technology solutions designed for restaurants. Since then it has experienced rapid growth generating more than 500,000 bookings and almost €14 million of turnover for restauranteurs. Today Restalo is the reference portal for online restaurant reservations in Spain. The high quality of product offered to both diners and restaurants, as confirmed by their very positive feedback, sets them apart from their competitors.

The secret of its success is that it offers the user the ability to book a table in real time in thousands of restaurants, with immediate confirmation of the booking and discounts of up to 70%, which to date have allowed users to save more than €6 million. The site expects to have more than 5,000 restaurants bookable online, and approximately one million reservations processed, by the end of 2011.

The company also offers restaurants an innovative reservation management system to replace the antiquated paper reservation book.