Investor hails more than five times return on exit
CEM service provider Fizzback, which counts BT, Virgin Media, T-Mobile, Carphone Warehouse and Meteor amongst its customers, has been bought by NICE for $80 million.
The acquisition will combine Fizzback’s customer response software service – termed Voice of the Customer – with NICE’s customer analytics capability.
Fizzback offers its Voice of the Customer product on a SaaS bases. The service sends consumers requests for feedback relating to a specific interaction or transaction via mobile, web or social media. The customer feedback (or Fizzback) is then analysed by the system to determine a relevant response. The company’s lead investor said that it currently generates 150 million of these feedback responses annually.
Zeevi Bregman, President and CEO of NICE explained the acquisition, saying that, “With the addition of Fizzback, NICE is expanding the scope of its capabilities by introducing a Customer Experience Management solution with the most complete Voice of the Customer offering. This enables our customers to more effectively capture, understand and leverage VoC as the foundation to a cross-enterprise CEM strategy.”
Mike Chalfen, of private equity investor Advent Tech, said in a Twitter post that his company had made “overall 6x our money” through the exit. He added that the sale would also give Fizzback “big distribution” for its SaaS based solution.
In a blog post, Chalfen said that Advent would have been happy to continue backing Fizzback but “the founder and team feel that the combination with NICE is the best way to realise the company’s vision, by giving access to global distribution and an enhanced, integrated product offering.
“We expect the acquisition to provide a different path for Fizzback to become a true global leader in its market.”
Clearly, Fizzback has worked hard for this deal. With less than $8 million funding to date, the company has had to maximise its internal resources. Chalfen related that to win one deal, the CEO Rob Keve and his US sales lead had remained on the phone for 18 hours to the procurement department of one large client to push a deal through. Additionally, Chalfen wrote, the team was worked exceedingly hard: “When preparing to go live with a new version of the product, every single member of the engineering team signed up for 3 months of working every evening, and all weekend.”