These days, customer satisfaction, experience, and customer relationships are some of the most important concepts for any business to consider if they want to get ahead of the competition and stay successful in the modern world. SO Connect is one of the companies helping offline businesses maintain a stronger relationship with their clients when the interactions they have with those people start in a brick and mortar store.
SO Connect are market leaders when I comes to Guest engagement (SO WIFI), and their review management platform (SO Review). We spoke with the innovative CEO and founder of the company, Daan Donders, to learn more about his business.
Tell Us About You and SO Connect
SO Connect is a marketing automation platform that empowers local businesses to get and stay in touch with their offline visitors and improve their online reputation. The brand was launched by Daan Donders in 2012, in Amsterdam, and it currently serves tens of thousands of clients, along with millions of users across the globe. Today SO Connect is active in more than 30 countries.
Donders told me that the goal in creating SO Connect was to give local business owners a way to get in contact with customers that came into their offline stores. Extracting data from offline customers has always been difficult, but SO Connect have maintained the same aim throughout the last five years, and they’re seeing incredible results.
“The two propositions we currently have are SO WIFI, a tool that extracts data from people entering a store through a WiFi log-in, and SO Review, which is a review management platform to help offline companies accelerate their online reputation.”
What Do You Think Makes You So Popular?
SO Connect has clearly seen some exceptional results from their products. Currently, Donders told me that the organisation is seeing a steady growth rate of around 40% year-over-year.
“I think that we’re very different from other companies that have been trying to solve a similar problem for the marketplace. The key for us has always been to deliver a simple and easy-to-use product that any business owner can understand.”
“I think the mistake that a lot of other companies make is trying to offer too many features at once. On the other hand, we worked backward from our customer’s problems to offer a solution.”
According to Daan, the SO Connect services cost a minimum amount of time and money to implement, but they deliver maximum results. “I think the simplicity of the platform is one of the biggest things for us. At the same time, we offer a highly personalised experience for our customers, building relationships with them and finding out what they need for their business.”
What is Your Relationship Like with Pragma?
SO Connect deliver their services to the UK market through their channel partner Pragma. The Pragma brand is SO Connect’s sole distributor in the UK, and Daan told me that the companies have a fantastic relationship.
“Pragma has been a great channel for us to work with in the UK market. They’ve been highly successful in the past with selling the Ericsson-LG iPECS product, and I think they take the right approach towards selling to channel partners across the UK.”
“Since the beginning, both Tim (Brooks, Pragma MD) and Will (Morey, Pragma Sales and Marketing Director) have been very helpful to us, and they’ve really assisted in building our success in the UK.”
Additionally, Daan noted that he appreciates the fact that SO Connect can offer something to Pragma in return. The customer relationship company offer training to help Pragma partners successfully take the product to market, and regularly provide Pragma with feedback to help both Pragma and SO Connects brand growth.
What are the Most Popular Use Cases for Your Product?
As SO Connect’s product set SO Review and SO WIFI continues to build presence in the UK market, I was interested to find out what kind of use cases the company has been seeing so far. Daan told me that they only introduced the SO Review system to the product portfolio very recently, so it’s a fairly new concept for channel partners in the UK. However, even introducing this possibility has changed the way that SO Connect package their proposition.
“We’re giving people a way to find out what they need to improve their business and helping them understand how they can improve their reputation. After they’ve started to build a name for themselves, they can then use SO WIFI to continue getting in touch with their customers and collecting more reviews. I think there’s still a lot of change coming with the introduction of SO Review.”
Daan told me that although the majority of SO Connect’s customers for SO Review are currently brands in the hospitality space, he believes that any business could benefit from learning more about the relationship they have with their customers.
“All kinds of offline businesses need to establish a relationship with their customers and preserve their online reputation.”
What’s the Plan for SO Connect Going Forward?
Finally, I asked Donders where he believed SO Connect might be headed in the years to come. He told me that the main focus for the company right now is to continue adding to the portfolio with new and more advanced features.
“I think the future for us is all about bringing out more tools that will help business owners to generate more revenue at the end of the day. Although we do need to keep building on our portfolio and evolving to provide new things, we’ll always be focused on keeping things simple too.”
Daan said that the SO Connect tools will continue to have a focus on being as simple, time-friendly, and budget-friendly as possible.
