A customer leaves a review after buying a product online. Another contacts a support centre. Hundreds more discuss the same brand across social media, app stores, forums, emails, and chat platforms. None of this information is particularly difficult to find. The difficulty lies elsewhere. Businesses have long struggled to determine which comments matter, which concerns are recurring, and which signals point to larger problems. The volume of feedback available today is vastly different from what companies dealt with a decade ago, creating a growing market for technologies designed to interpret customer conversations at scale.
The challenge is not new. Customer satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Score programmes have been used for years to measure customer sentiment. Those metrics remain widely used across industries. Yet they often provide outcomes rather than explanations. A score can indicate that satisfaction has fallen. It does not necessarily explain the reason. As customer interactions became increasingly digital, many companies began looking beyond traditional survey programmes and toward platforms capable of analyzing large volumes of unstructured feedback.
It was within this environment that Clootrack was established in 2017 by Shameel Abdulla and Subbakrishna Rao. Founded in Bengaluru and later headquartered in Delaware, the company entered a market that was already becoming crowded with customer experience and analytics providers. Rather than concentrating on numerical scoring systems alone, the company focused on analyzing customer conversations collected from a wide range of sources. The premise was relatively simple. Businesses already possessed vast amounts of customer data. The larger challenge was understanding what that data was saying.
The company’s early development attracted attention within India’s startup ecosystem. In January 2019, TechCircle, YourStory, Entrackr, BW Disrupt, Economic Times Brand Equity, and The News Minute reported that Clootrack had raised approximately $500,000 in seed funding. The round included participation from Indian Angel Network, IAN Fund, Unicorn India Ventures, SEA Fund, and Malabar Angel Network. At the time, coverage focused on the company’s use of artificial intelligence to identify patterns within customer feedback and generate insights from conversations taking place across digital channels.
By then, customer experience had become a boardroom topic across many industries. Research firms and consulting groups were increasingly discussing the commercial impact of customer retention, service quality, and customer loyalty. The amount of information available to organizations was expanding rapidly. Reviews appeared within minutes of a purchase. Customer complaints spread publicly across social media platforms. Contact centres generated large volumes of call transcripts and support records. Collecting information was no longer the primary obstacle. Making sense of it was.
Clootrack’s platform was developed around that problem. As can be seen from public data about the business and the products offered by the company, the platform collects customer feedback gathered through surveys, review platforms, emails, chats, calls, social media interactions, and other communication channels used by customers. Instead of trying to gauge only the level of satisfaction that customers have with their products and services, the software aims to discover repeated issues, trends, and behavioral reasons in order to understand why customers react in a certain way.
The firm has slowly started moving out of its startup stage. Based on the publicly available data on Clootrack, there are now more than 150 companies in the enterprise segment that use the platform and work in the fields of retail, financial institutions, healthcare, hotels and hospitality, automotive, tourism and travel, consumer goods, and mobile applications. The integration of customer experience management into product development, marketing, and customer service has helped generate more demand for such platforms.
In September 2021, the company attracted further attention when TechCrunch reported that it had raised $4 million in a Series A funding round led by Inventus Capital India. Inc42 also covered the investment. The funding announcement placed Clootrack among a group of customer experience technology companies seeking to expand as organisations invested more heavily in analytics and artificial intelligence. Media coverage at the time highlighted the company’s effort to analyze customer feedback from both first-party and third-party sources and convert that information into business insights.
As artificial intelligence entered a new phase during the early 2020s, customer experience software providers began introducing new tools built around large language models and conversational interfaces. Clootrack was among them. In 2023, destinationCRM reported that the company launched AskClootrack with GPT, a feature intended to allow users to query customer experience data through natural language. The development reflected a broader trend across the software industry, where companies sought to make complex datasets easier to explore through conversational systems.
Beyond funding news releases and new product announcements, the company was also featured in news stories involving customer deployments. In 2022, The Hindu BusinessLine revealed that the company V-Guard Industries was partnering with Clootrack for analytics solutions using voice of the customer technology. These press releases provided valuable information about the practical applications of voice of the customer solutions. For most businesses, the goal was more than merely collecting customer feedback, but rather analyzing trends that emerged in thousands of interactions simultaneously.
Industry recognition followed as well. Clootrack was a part of the NASSCOM Emerge 50 program in 2021 and took part in the Microsoft Highway to a Hundred Unicorns program in 2020. It was also a part of certain programs that are related to the NASSCOM National Initiative for Developing and Harnessing Innovations. In 2023, it received recognition from the TiE50 award programs.
In that respect, the company’s growth reflects another trend that has been developing over the past decade within the field of customer experience management. Today, businesses operate in a context where customers interact on a constant basis, rather than in periodic bursts. Information comes in via review sites, live chat, helpdesk tickets, social media updates, and all manner of other digital channels. The end product is a flood of unstructured data that cannot be processed effectively using conventional techniques.
In light of the above, Clootrack stands out as one instance of how software vendors have tried to tackle the problem. While originally launched in Bengaluru in 2017, the company has continued throughout its history to pursue an agenda of analyzing customers’ conversations and determining their motivations. It does not matter whether we look at the company from the standpoint of startup investment, corporate use, customer experience technology, or the general rise of artificial intelligence, its evolution shows a number of trends associated with recent developments in the sector of customer analytics.
