Cork start-up Voxxify helps IT leaders to better understand how employees feel about the technology they use at work and save millions of spend.
Voxxify systematically gathers, segments and prioritises employee feedback for any size company in days, compared with many months for existing solutions, so IT can act quickly and decisively.
“Right now, IT leaders, including CIOs and CTOs, have no good way to understand how well the technology and services they provide are meeting the needs of end users,” said Voxxify founder and CEO Steve Fleming.
“Our customers have identified millions of dollars of savings from a single, two-week survey, while also delivering double digit improvements in employee satisfaction”
“We call it the IT Experience Gap, and it leads to massive waste in what is a $4trn dollar industry. We believe that every organisation in the world from 50 to 5 million employees has this problem, although 99% don’t realise it yet.
“As a consequence, the market is extremely large and almost entirely under served.”
Tech’s appeal
Voxxify is an AI-powered decision-making platform that helps IT leaders translate employee feedback into actionable insights that they can use to make better purchasing, implementation, communication & training decisions.
“Our customers have identified millions of dollars of savings from a single, two-week survey, while also delivering double digit improvements in employee satisfaction,” said Fleming.
Enterprising spirit
Voxxify’s founder and CEO Steve Fleming, has worked in enterprise IT for over 20 years, and discovered that IT leaders were wasting millions each year because of the difficulty in matching IT services to the needs of corporate employees.
Having represented Ireland internationally in athletics for over 10 years, Fleming saw the opportunity to bring high-performance goal-setting, coupled with a disciplined engineering approach to tackle this challenge in a new way.
SaaS surge
Fleming believes support for early stage start-ups is very good in general in Ireland, although he says enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) is still a bit of an unknown quantity for Irish investors.
“We have benefited from supports like Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers programme and HPSU backing, as well as the NDRC accelerator in 2019.
“In the Southwest we’ve found IT@Cork and RDI Hub in Kerry really helpful, and we are encouraged by the work Scale Ireland is doing to highlight the startup sector to the government and influence policy change.”
The business is planning to raise funding in 2022 to accelerate its growth internationally.
Typically for a business of its generation, Voxxify pretty much runs itself in the cloud using available SaaS tools. “We use Zoom for video calls; Signal for secure team messaging; Google Drive for collaboration; and Google Authenticator, LastPass & YubiKeys for secure access to the cloud.”
His key takeaway from founding a business is “everything takes longer than you expect.”
Fleming’s advice to founders is to be switched on when it comes to critical thinking and receiving feedback. Listening is crucial.
“Challenge your assumptions often and make sure you are listening clearly to what customers are telling you.
“Often, what people say and what we hear are not the same thing. Find ways to hear better.”
Main image: Voxxify founder Steve Fleming
