Seattle startup Usermind has released enhancements to its eponymous application- and data-integration service that let companies include their partners’ data as well.
Usermind is software as a service, hosted by Amazon Web Services, that links together the various applications and data sources an end-user might encounter in trying to do tasks like setting up cable service, explained CEO Michel Feaster.
“It’s a journey, in the sense that end-user customers start with an objective and measure success by how easily they get there,” she said. “They don’t care how many of a company’s databases, call centers or teams are involved. We help the company link together all the resources needed to get the customers to their destination.”
Partners of a solar-panel maker might be the dealers who sell the panels and the installers who put them into place. The needs of partners are often quite different and more complex than those of the customer, Feaster explained, yet “engaging them, too, has a big impact on the customer’s experience.” For example, a partner with the right technology and training can help the customer choose the right product, get it installed quickly and minimize frustration with repairs or replacement.
Co-founded in 2013 by technology veterans Michel Feaster and Przemek Pardyak (the latter of whom has now left the company), Usermind has aimed to connect software-as-a-service apps and on-premises databases, providing a single, unified view of all data. It allows linking separate products — such as group-messaging app Slack, mobile-app analytics app Mixpanel and marketing app Marketo — and flowing data from one to the other in ways none of the individual products’ makers may have envisioned. Today, 86 percent of businesses use more than five applications or systems that affect their customers’ experience, and more than a third use more than 20 applications, according to Usermind.
Usermind has also begun making data owned by its customers available for a charge on AWS’s Redshift data warehouse, where they can use pre-built Tableau visualization tools or other analytics products to find insights, or can ship data back to their own warehouses.
The company has 35 customers among the Fortune 2000, 40 employees and total venture funding of $22.1 million, after its most recent funding round got in March.
