Let’s dive into the world of user insights today, with a startup looking to jumpstart waning participation in customer surveys by encouraging users to share their thoughts via their voice.

There are a bunch of startups in this space, but London’s Cluso thinks it has an edge.

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– Martin

Cluso is harnessing the growth of voice notes to collect smarter user data for businesses

You can barely email a business these days without getting a request to fill in a survey.

Whether you’re buying a gift online, booking a test drive for a car, ordering a replacement bin from your council, or visiting a museum, the survey request email shortly afterwards is almost inevitable.

…and almost inevitably ignored.

“Response rates are really, really low,” says Nana Parry, who until recently ran a customer feedback agency for eight years.

“We've seen response rates dramatically drop. People don't want to answer surveys in the same way that they did.”

And so Parry and his fellow co-founders from the Tectonic agency set to work developing a potential solution in the shape of Cluso.

Cluso jumps on the increasingly prevalent use of voice notes in messaging apps, by letting people answer surveys with their voice. The software then analyses the content and tone of responses to help organisations understand their customers better, and make better decisions.

“We know there are over 7 billion WhatsApp voice notes in every day,” says Parry. It’s worth noting that this is a 2022 stat and it seems likely that the figure is higher now.

“We know 18-to-30 year olds don't pick up the phone anymore… and if you look out on the street you'll probably see someone voice-noting right now in response to one of their their friends. And some people just don't have the time to sit down and think about their response, they prefer to just respond in a natural way. We feel we're going to be bringing more people into engaging with businesses and products than otherwise would have because of a lack of time,” Parry adds.

He gives an example of an AI company using Cluso’s software to collect input from its users to help test the developers’ assumptions about their product.

“It's actually much easier to speak about your concerns around AI than it is to write about it. So we’re getting that raw, emotional response,” Parry says.

Cluso lists Ipswich Borough Council as another early user.

“Local councils often want to understand how what we think about certain initiatives, planning permission, if a new concert is going to be held in the area, we [local residents] need to give input. But at the moment, we don't engage with local government very much, so getting those insights is really difficult,” Parry says.

“Ipswich Council created an augmented reality trail in their town to increase dwell time locally. They were able to use Cluso to capture feedback at that moment in time, because it was a physical experience. They used the analysis from the responses to re-release the trail, increasing dwell time and getting more people to spend more time in the town.”

The story so far

Parry has a background in managing IT projects for companies like Fujitsu and Rackspace.

He founded his first startup, an app called Dubzoo to help musicians grow their fanbases, in 2013. After it didn’t work out, he worked with venture studio L Marks, while simultaneously running the Tectonic agency, building products to help collect customer feedback.

Cluso is an evolution of the co-founders’ work at Tectonic, which they sold last year. The startup now claims 15 B2B customers and Parry says current demand is led by local government, hotels, and large events.

“We are focusing on markets that tend to be underserved,” says Parry.

“A lot of our competitors are focused on product managers and customer success teams. We're really focusing on teams who know AI needs to be incorporated into their business. They need that feedback, but they're not quite yet for conversational AI or agentic AI. They will move there eventually, but we want to be the starting point for them.”

On the AI front, Cluso is working on a ‘chat to your data’ feature to allow users to make sense of survey responses via a conversational interface, along with some automated AI analysis.

While Cluso currently supports 10 languages, they’re working on expanding this to 30.

“We're also creating a new dashboard, which really starts to quantify this qualitative data, to make it much easier to make decisions,” Parry says.

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