Brisbane Startup Winja Is Encouraging Customers To Complain

No matter how well you manage your business, you’ll still get a complaint or two every now and then. With the rise of social media, complaints can spread across multiple platforms and prove a hassle for companies to manage — which is why Brisbane startup Winja wants to be the new destination for complaints.

Customer complaint image via Shutterstock

The name Winja comes from the platform’s use of the term ‘winj’ (like ‘whinge’) to refer to complaints, and actually seeks to encourage customers to have a bit of a whinge. Yet unlike Facebook, Twitter or even Google Reviews, Winja wants to encourage businesses to address and respond to complaints in a transparent and productive manner. The idea for Winja came from founders Chris Rozic and Cos Luccitti’s shared experiences in marketing, where businesses experienced teething problems with complaints on social media — such as brands being mentioned in comments containing complaints but having no effective way to address them.

The platform works two ways — benefiting customers by giving them a space to air their grievances and encouraging companies to actually do something about the problem addressed. Although complaints are (unfortunately) central to most business’s practices, software platforms to manage and resolve complaints are still somewhat niche.

“It’s not just so much about a social media play just say, it’s about centralising it so it’s easier for both brands and consumers to post complaints, or Winj’s rather, in our platform and then drive meaningful resolution out of that complaint,” Winja cofounder Chris Rozic explained to Startup Daily.

Winja is accessible via either a web browser or an app, and seems to operate similarly to Facebook — each business will have a ‘complaint feed’ organised chronologically. Each ‘Winj’ can be commented on or liked by other users, and even shared to other social platforms. Winja admits that the tricky part will be getting customers onto the platform when they already enjoy complaining on Facebook and Twitter so much, but the concept still has a lot of promise.

Businesses themselves subscribe to Winja For Business, with a tiered pricing model starting from $9.95 per month — including valuable access to data that is generated within the Winja platform. But how will centralising all the myriad customer complaints a company gets be ultimately good for business?

“Instead of it just being a rant and rave by a customer and pacifying it with just, thanks for your complaint, shoot us an email here, it’s a legitimate rant and rave about what went wrong and then a business working with the customer to pacify it,” Rozic said. “Then there’s other users being able to see what happens, so then it builds your brand credibility. I see it being a play on brand help… it centralises all your negative sentiment about your brand, however it empowers you as a business to act upon that as an opportunity to retain customers and also develop new customers at the same time.”

The app is currently available on iOS, with an Android version to come soon. Winja is currently offering businesses a free 90 day trial, with the aim to get 1000 paying customers on board in the next year.

[Startup Daily]


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