Kapiche: Provides deep, actionable insights into customer feedback and behavior with Google Cloud

About Kapiche

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Queensland, Australia, Kapiche provides text analytics software that helps businesses understand their customers better. This software enables businesses to aggregate and analyze the “free text” section of customer surveys—a section that allows customers to provide open-ended responses to questions about products, services, or experiences—and combine this information with other relevant structured data to obtain deep, actionable insights that improve customer experience and grow revenue.

Industries: Technology
Location: Australia

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With Google Cloud, Kapiche is enabling businesses to analyze customer feedback survey responses and aggregate these responses with other data to improve customer experiences.

Google Cloud results

  • Saves AUD$50,000 by running on Google Cloud rather than on-premises infrastructure
  • Enables founders to develop software without administering systems
  • Helps the business win prominent clients

Improving customer experience is vital to the success of businesses today. Customer experience leaders have happier customers, higher retention rates, and higher revenue growth than their competitors. Using customer experience surveys to gain insights into individuals’ thoughts about and experiences with products, services, or brands enables businesses to understand the key issues affecting customers. This understanding helps businesses make impactful decisions to improve customer experience.

Processed 57,771 files, created 59,442 analyses, and analyzed 154,123 responses on Google Cloud

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Queensland, Australia, Kapiche provides text analytics software that helps businesses understand their customers. This software enables businesses to analyze the “free text” section of customer surveys—a section that allows customers to provide open-ended responses to questions about products, services, or experiences—and combine this information with other relevant customer data for deep, actionable insights that improve customer experience and grow revenue.

“We specialize in taking the data from open-ended, unstructured questions along with data from traditional closed, structured questions—such as customer experience metrics—to give organizations a high degree of visibility to make strategic decisions that increase customer loyalty, growth and revenue,” says Caleb Hattingh, Head of Engineering at Kapiche. “We also layer sentiment analysis over the aggregated survey responses and display these insights on customizable dashboards that can be shared across a business. This allows business teams to see what customers are really trying to tell them and make the necessary changes when something isn’t working well.

“This is extremely valuable—particularly when businesses receive responses about issues they didn’t already know about, which comes from providing open-ended questions that give customers the freedom to share their thoughts and feelings in their own words,” Hattingh adds.

Kapiche allows any business collecting and analyzing more than 250 surveys per month to automate and improve the accuracy of the customer feedback analysis processes that would otherwise require large teams to complete manually. With Kapiche, these processes can be completed in minutes rather than weeks.

Kapiche office

Cloud service a no-brainer

When launching the business, Kapiche’s founders—Ryan Stuart and Kris Rogers—aimed to build software themselves. Selecting a cloud service rather than investing in data center hardware and software was a no-brainer. “Ryan and Kris were not going to be doing system administration work,” says Hattingh. “The ease of provisioning services in the cloud actually allowed Kapiche to get started.”

Stuart and Rogers also needed a cloud service that could process large volumes of data for aggregation, analysis, and reporting.

“Google Cloud’s arrangement of services was much more coherent than its competitors. In addition, Google had designed infrastructure and AI-powered services that could handle analytics-heavy workloads or processes.”

Caleb Hattingh, Head of Engineering, Kapiche

Google Cloud “coherent”

After a comprehensive review, the founders turned to Google Cloud to provide the cloud platform for Kapiche. “Google Cloud’s arrangement of services was much more coherent than its competitors,” says Hattingh. “In addition, Google had designed infrastructure and AI-powered services that could handle analytics-heavy workloads or processes.

“Finally, Google’s pricing of Compute Engine instances by the second and track record of reducing prices regularly was very appealing.”

Google Kubernetes Engine—a service that provides a production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications—also gave impetus to the fledgling business. The service enables Kapiche to deploy and iterate applications quickly, with underlying cloud compute, memory, and storage resources provisioned automatically.

To help Kapiche maximize the value of Google Kubernetes Engine, the Google team ran a dedicated full-day technical workshop for the business. The team followed up with on-demand training and enablement.

Kapiche now runs its backend web servers and associated microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine, with other Google services running peripheral components of its architecture. The business serves its front end as a JavaScript bundle from Cloud Storage and, when loaded into a browser, makes backend calls to an API service that also runs in Google Kubernetes Engine. Compute resources are distributed to optimize performance and availability from Cloud Load Balancing.

The business is running its staging and production environments in two separate Kubernetes clusters and taking advantage of Cloud Build to deliver its software releases quickly and monitor a release pipeline that resides on GitHub. When Cloud Build detects a change, the service creates a clone of Kapiche’s source code and builds a deployable release artifact to send to Google Kubernetes Engine. If Cloud Build detects a frontend change, it builds the new JavaScript bundle that then serves pages for loading.

"With Google Cloud, we are nearly fully automated."

Caleb Hattingh, Head of Engineering, Kapiche

Nearly fully automated

“With Google Cloud, we are nearly fully automated,” says Hattingh. “Our only manual process is required to trigger a deployment.”

Kapiche also turned to Natural Language API—a service that uses pre-trained Google machine learning models to reveal the structure and meaning of text—to deliver its core value proposition of sentiment analysis. “If Google had not provided sentiment capabilities, we would have had to build our own sentiment engine, which would have been a big distraction for us,” says Hattingh. "Furthermore, Google allows us to use language detection to help process feedback from customers in languages other than English.”

Kapiche team

Savings of AUD$50,000

The business estimates savings of about AUD$50,000—a significant sum for a business still in its early growth phase—by running on Google Cloud rather than in on-premises infrastructure. Google Cloud is also contributing to a track record of performance—processing 57,771 files, creating 59,442 analyses, and analyzing 154,123 responses—that is attracting clients such as Nissan, American Express, and Target.

With its Google Cloud infrastructure meeting its needs, Kapiche is exploring ways of providing more relevant products and services to customers. For example, the business is offering its text analytics solution via an architecture comprising separate SQLite databases, making it easier to run on-premises—ideal for big businesses that cannot cloud-host due to internal policies. “If an existing customer wants to move to an on-premises environment, or a new customer can only run on-premises, we can provide a solution that incorporates an SQLite database file residing on their system,” says Hattingh.

Kapiche’s solution running in Google Cloud now enables businesses to quickly determine which customer issues are having the greatest impact on customer experience and therefore customer spend and satisfaction. “Businesses can drill down into this information in a matter of minutes,” says Hattingh. “Doing so is extremely powerful—Kapiche produces deep, accurate insights quickly to enable businesses to gain an edge over their competitors.”

“Our experience with Google Cloud and the Google team has been extremely positive. As we break down our stack into more composable microservices, we are looking to expand our use of Google Kubernetes Engine.”

Caleb Hattingh, Head of Engineering, Kapiche

“We’re now working with customers to attach a dollar value to their customer experience issues and initiatives. Customers can then identify the exact return on investment of their customer experience initiatives and the increase in spending that is likely to come from addressing customer issues that have been identified in the analyses.”

Hattingh remains pleased that Kapiche opted for Google Cloud as its cloud platform. “Our experience with Google Cloud and the Google team has been extremely positive.

“As we break down our stack into more composable microservices, we are looking to expand our use of Google Kubernetes Engine."

“Overall, seeing the range of Google Cloud services grow, the organization’s commitment to analytical workflows and AI, and the addition of new regions, we are extremely confident that we have made the right decision.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Kapiche

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Queensland, Australia, Kapiche provides text analytics software that helps businesses understand their customers better. This software enables businesses to aggregate and analyze the “free text” section of customer surveys—a section that allows customers to provide open-ended responses to questions about products, services, or experiences—and combine this information with other relevant structured data to obtain deep, actionable insights that improve customer experience and grow revenue.

Industries: Technology
Location: Australia