Srivats Srinivasan
Know’N’act CEO Srivats Srinivasan

Poor reviews on a site like Yelp or TripAdvisor can be quite detrimental for a small business owner. But now one Seattle startup wants to help prevent those low ratings with a tool that lets businesses individually connect to customers in real-time via their smartphones.

Know’N’act today officially launched and announced a $500,000 seed round from angels like Rudy Gadre, Gary Rubens, Vijay Vashee, and Andrew Wright, in addition to an investment from RoundGlass Partners, a group formed by Edifecs founder Sunny Singh.

The company offers a cloud-based customer engagement platform that allows its clients — which typically come from retail, restaurants, and hotels — to communicate with customers more quickly and more effectively, receiving instant feedback down to the specific individual and location.

IMG_8140Once a company decides which feedback is good or bad, they can then act on that information while the customer is still around. The product also spits out analytics to help businesses track feedback and manage campaigns.

Prior to today’s funding round, know’N’act was incubated within Nayamode, a digital marketing company founded by CEO Srivata Srinivasan in 2005.

“When several customers asked for custom solutions at much higher price points to do what Know’N’act does today, it became apparent that there was a need to productize the solution and help scale it for a much larger number of customers,” Srinivasan said.

Know’N’act, which employs 10 and makes money off a subscription model, already has customers like McDonald’s, Best Western, MOD Pizza, and an array of small businesses. Srinivasan added that his company differentiates itself because it not only collects real-time customer feedback, but also allows businesses to respond to problems instantly.

“For example, if a customer is unhappy, our platform can not only capture that feedback, but also trigger an alert to the manager via email, text and app push notification,” Srinivasan said. “If a customer is happy but not a member of a loyalty program, we could trigger an invitation to the program or ask them to engage on social media channels. Or, if a customer is happy but an infrequent customer, we could trigger an offer or coupon to them on the fly to get them to come back faster or refer their friends.”

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