
My name is Simon Neve and I am the CEO and Founder of Fusion Software Limited, based in the UK

I've always been interested in feedback and the positive effects it can have on people and organizations. So when I was asked to write a piece of software for a survey call centre provider in 2001, I jumped at the chance. 21 years later, they are still using the same software, with the same code base.

Mojo Surveys was a product we built to provide surveys for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In 2015 Microsoft bought the IP for Mojo Surveys and we spent the following year working with Microsoft to integrate it into their Dynamics CRM product - it went on to become the Voice of the Customer for Dynamics CRM.

Well in 2016 we didn't have a product anymore! So we sat down and tried to revisit surveys as they had become largely ineffective at gathering meaningful feedback and caused a huge amount of friction - something that is even more true today.

Chatbots were maturing at the time and we built the worlds first Chatbot Survey with a conversational UI and Wizu was born. Wizu's conversational UI transformed the feedback experience and we've continued to use it to collect feedback for major organizations around the world ever since.

Well, it was when we used Wizu for our first major study for a bus company. The survey asked questions about the customer journey and their experiences. We'd just added a simple new transcript feature, that re-told the questions and answers in the order they were asked.

The transcripts provided amazing results! I remember reading one response, in particular, it was from a single mother that described her painful journey and how difficult it was to get on and off the bus with a pushchair. She described how she relied on the Wi-Fi on the bus to check the next stage of her journey, and if she missed her change and was late for work, then her employer docked her pay. The feedback really came alive and allowed senior executives to replay her experience and understand that Wi-Fi wasn't just a nice-to-have; it was much more important to certain customer groups.

It took us a while to work out why some transcripts leapt off the page and others didn't. It was, of course, the power of storytelling.

No, it wasn't until Covid hit that we had some time to research it further and conduct some experiments.

The more I researched stories the more I understood just how powerful they are, not just in feedback, but in media, sport, politics technology and how they impacted our daily life. Collecting feedback was one element in the wider story framework and we took the decision for Wizu to niche down on collecting and presenting stories for customer social proof.

We'll continue to apply the latest AI tech to help our customers collect conversational feedback and help build better stories for their brands and products. We're always looking to connect with like-minded people who value storytelling, so please reach out if that is you.