Gemvara founder Matt Lauzon, his Dunwello co-founder Matt Brand, and the team at Dunwello have been working since late last year on an employee recognition software product that aims to promote more inter-office positivity and a sense of personal accomplishment that seems to be absent from the modern workplace.
They have done multiple beta tests at local companies, and, after getting feedback from users, Lauzon, Brand, and crew decided to add a new feature to their application. The new Uber-esque rating system for workers/employees that they added as an email signature option became popular pretty quickly among beta users; so much so that Dunwello is now making a small shift in its initial vision to make the rating system a key component of Dunwello moving forward.
The new rating system, which allows co-workers, company leadership, or, for small business owners, even customers, to rate how well someone is doing at their job, on a task, or with pretty much any business interaction. Basically, Dunwello is bringing the feature that websites like TripAdvisor were built on to everyone.
The rating feature is set up as an add-on to an email signature so that pretty much anyone you connect with over business email has the opportunity to rate the interaction.
For workplaces, it creates a constant way for co-workers and management to give feedback on work during projects, where most communication happens over email anyway.
One of the best uses for the new Dunwello features is for small business owners to create their own TripAdvisor/Uber-esque feedback platform. Customers can rate an experience at a salon, by a service provider, and even the work of a public servant. (Alan Casavant, the mayor of Biddeford, Maine, has a Dunwello profile to receive feedback from constituents.) All that person needs to do is added the Dunwello rating feature to their email signature.
Take for example Erika Alvarez, who is a hair stylist as Pini Swissa salon. Here is how she is using Dunwello for her business.
Dunwello, cleverly, auto-formats the signature link with a “How’s My Driving?” tagline, but the lead-in to the rating link can be customized to say pretty much anything.
As Lauzon explained on the shift, “We’re focused on making it easy for people to give and receive feedback on the professional experiences they have every day. That requires enabling feedback from all types of stakeholders — peers, managers, customers, clients, partners, suppliers, etc.”
“It also requires making sure people can provide feedback without disrupting their normal work flow. We’re really excited about what we’ve learned thus far in our beta testing and the roadmap we have for our product moving ahead.”
The shift to putting more focus on the service rating through email feature could be a big step for Dunwello, which hasn’t officially launched out of its beta testing phase yet. Word is that the new approach has piqued the interest of a few investors who may have passed on Dunwello’s $1.7 million first round of funding that featured Common Angels, NextView Ventures, G20 Ventures, the Vegas Tech Fund, and angel investors Jeremy Levine and Jordan Fliegel, Axel Bichara, Gautam Gupta, Jeremy Hitchcock, and Mark Guadagnoli.
Dennis Keohane was a Senior Staff Writer for BetaBoston.
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