By Kevin Cummings - NTX Inno Staff Writer September
09, 2020, 07:21am CDT Updated 30 minutes ago
After leaving his role as global CMO at
Rackspace, entrepreneur Mark Bunting began working full time on a project that
came to him year before.
Bunting and the team at service industry
employee-focused social media platform Grata were gearing
up in mid-April for a launch of its app, going live in more than 100
restaurants in the area. But then, COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S. and
a pandemic was declared, shutting down many of the businesses Grata was
initially planning to work with.
“When they all shut down for a brief
period, we thought, ‘Well, maybe this is the dumbest idea at the worst time
ever, it will be a Harvard business study on what not to do at the absolute
most horrible time in years,’” Bunting told NTX Inno. “And it was shortly
thereafter that we realized we had a tiger by the tail.”
However, rather than being a deterrent,
Bunting said the pandemic has been an accelerator for Grata, highlighting not
only the role that frontline service workers play in people’s daily lives but
also the importance of recognizing that work in the larger community.
“All of the sudden, as a nation we sort of
realized that the frontline people that have been taking care of us forever and
ever… we never really acknowledged were key to our survival,” Bunting said.
Bunting describes Grata as a sort of
LinkedIn or personalized Angie’s List for service workers. Through its app,
which launched today on the Apple and Google app stores, employees can upload
resumes and create profiles that allow them to connect with customers who are
able to leave reviews and comments, as well as leave tips for the employee. On
the other end, employers can access the data and analytics to identify strong
team members and recognize hard work within their ranks on a store, geographic
or individual level.
“One of the things that we found is there’s
no way to harvest performance data and the subsequent analytics behind it for
frontline employees. There’s lots of tools that measure middle management or
senior management, but no one’s ever cracked the code on how do I find out how
my frontline customer service reps, for example, are doing,” Bunting said.
The idea for Grata came to Bunting after a
trip to Home Depot on 2017. While there, an employee spent about an hour and a
half walking the aisles with Bunting, explaining told and techniques he would
need for the project. After he checked out, Bunting wanted to find a manager to
praise the employee. But there wasn’t one to be found. He said he left the
store feeling the was a missed opportunity – one on the part of the store not
capitalizing off of his happiness with the brand, and one on his part for not
making a connection that he could come back to when needed.
“That’s really what started the journey, is
every day we have people that do a great job in a variety of different fields,
primarily in the service sector, those working class folks who are out there
doing great deeds but aren’t getting recognized for it,” Bunting said. “We’ve
all had that experience like who was that great bartender we had down at that
restaurant or what was the name of the guy that did our HVAC repairs, who was
with the old company, we liked him so much, but he moved to another company?
It’s almost like that personal Angie’s List of people who give great service to
us that we want to go back to again and again and now they’re at our
fingertips.”
With the pandemic affecting the service
industry hard, closing restaurant dining rooms and permanently shuttering the
doors of some retailers across the country, Bunting sees an increased need for
Grata’s platform. He said businesses are beginning to recognize the need of
their customer-facing employees to help develop deeper customer connections and
brand affinity. He added that many top performing service industry workers
leave their jobs each year, not due to pay or conflicts with management, but
rather due to the feeling that their hard work is being overlooks – something
that can be costly to replace.
In addition to the pandemic, Bunting said
Grata also fits in the larger social discussion about racial and economic
equality that has come in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. He said that
the platform can help create a sort of personalized resume, giving future
employees access to documented reviews not just from a former employer but from
the customers the person directly serves, which will allow employees to advance
and grow in their careers.
“What gets me excited is the idea that if
we can get people using this application and build that ecosystem, then we can
really, truly move the needle for these…hard working people,” Bunting said.
To help grow following the launch of its
app, Grata has joined the Capital Factory accelerator program, which Bunting
said will likely later involve brining in outside VC dollars into the
bootstrapped company in the coming months. Currently, Grata is based in Dallas,
with a team of seven contract and part-time employees spread across North
Texas, Austin and Romania. However, due to the pandemic and the already spread
out nature of the team, Bunting said he is considering making Grata a virtual
organization as it looks to further develop its product and grow its team.
“This idea again is that the people who
treat us well, that we want to use again and again, now we have a seamless,
easy way to stay connected,” Bunting said. “You’re impacting peoples live
because quite frankly their impacting ours and they do great work every day,
and at the very least they deserve to be acknowledged.”
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