Gamification: Startup ByteBuzzer supports DB Regio AG Südost in collecting customer feedback in a playful way

Dresden-based startup ByteBuzzer has only been around since 2019, but it has already been cooperating with Deutsche Bahn since 2020. The founders Ludwig Gawer and Robert Klikics succeeded in this with their software tucatap. This helps medium-sized companies and corporations to obtain feedback from their customers in a playful way. To do this, the startup specifically draws on user experiences from social media as well as gamification. In this interview, Ludwig Gawer talks about how tucatap works and what added value the tool offers customers like Deutsche Bahn.

Ludwig, how did you come up with the idea for tucatap?

We noticed that many large companies have difficulty interacting with their customers when it comes to market research. This becomes clear, for example, when long questionnaires are handed out as part of market research that basically all look the same. Companies spend a lot of money to get feedback from their customers, but the user experience is poor. It is no fun to fill out such documents and the motivation to participate is correspondingly low.

I’m sure many of our readers are familiar with such questionnaires.

In addition, it is difficult to extrapolate from 500 participants to 800,000 customers throughout Germany, for example. But when companies are planning infrastructure measures in the millions, they need to be able to rely on the results. Companies are therefore looking for ways to get more feedback.

What they actually need is the opposite of long questionnaires for a few participants, namely selective feedback on specific questions from a large mass. If, for example, I have discussed a specific topic with around 10 percent of my customers – in the example, 80,000 instead of just 500 – I can tell many more precisely whether a measure will be well received in the future.

What does your solution look like?

With tucatap, we therefore offer customers Stories, similar to what you know from Instagram and Facebook. With these, we can entertain and inform on the one hand and collect data on the other. That is, users scan a QR code and are then directed to a sequence of images. With specific questions about the current usage experience, customers are picked up directly in their everyday lives. By clicking on emojis, they can give their opinion. Depending on the answer, various other images with questions then appear. This distinguishes our tool from stories on social media. In the background, we can develop different paths so that the stories that participants see and answer develop in different directions.

By the way, our solution is browser-based. That means anyone can click through the Stories on their phone without any other requirements, such as registration or an app.

You’ve already won over Deutsche Bahn with tucatap. How did you manage that?

Deutsche Bahn has introduced various Corona measures to protect travelers: Spacing, disinfection, contactless ticketing and much more. Our task was to find out how these measures were received by customers.

We used tucatap to playfully show rail customers of the S-Bahn Dresden for a week what Deutsche Bahn is doing with regard to Corona. One of our questions was, for example, “Did you know that the air in the train is exchanged 6 times per hour?” Many indicated that they were previously unaware of this. We then asked “Do you feel safer now?” And indeed, most participants answered “Yes” to that. Our survey showed Deutsche Bahn how important it is to communicate such measures early on.

How did you get your foot in the door at Deutsche Bahn?

We participated in a DB Mindbox call and prevailed against 120 startups. DB Mindbox is Deutsche Bahn’s innovation incubator in Berlin. With the help of the startup program, the company wants to drive innovation. We were allowed to carry out our test case with DB Regio AG Südost. The goal was to prove that our solution works within 100 days. The DB Regio AG Südost team supported us very well and made a lot of things possible in a short time. In the end, we were able to convince.

Some of our readers are not so familiar with social networks and Stories in particular. How can you still support them?

Our clients have the choice to create the stories themselves if they have marketing staff that is fit in the field. For these companies, we offer a virtual construction kit. For those who are not familiar with the topic at all, we take care of the content creation and data management.

Contact

Website: tucatap.com

LinkedIn: Ludwig Gawer