About Niggle

Niggle provides customer feedback services to a wide range of UK businesses. We help businesses get feedback using text messages, online surveys, and direct online messaging. The Niggle service allows customers to give feedback without revealing their identity to the business, and allows businesses to respond and reward customers even when they don't have contact details.

Niggle was founded in 2007 and is based in Woking, Surrey.

Why we started Niggle

Paul Fisher owned a small restaurant chain and loved asking his customers for feedback. He knew it made his customers feel engaged and valued, and often gave him useful suggestions and information to help him manage his staff better. But he wasn't sure that using comment cards was always the best way of asking customers for feedback. The feedback wasn't always relevant or useable. Cards could get "lost" on the way to the manager, and customers didn't always have a pen handy! Plus, he wasn't convinced it was easy enough for customers to give feedback, and managing comment cards could be manual and time-consuming.

Meanwhile, Paul's friend Helen Cammack was a customer with plenty of opinions, and thought businesses might like to know about some of them! But she wasn't sure whether businesses really wanted to hear her suggestions. After all, they weren't usually asking for them! And even when they were, Helen didn't trust that her comment card would get through to the owner or manager. She was too embarrassed to say "Can I speak to the manager please?", especially with a small suggestion. And telling a member of staff wasn't always welcomed and didn't always get through.

In her professional life, Helen happened to be a telecoms and internet expert, and she had noticed that although modern technology had given customers 101 ways to rate and review restaurants online, technology hadn't made it any easier to tell the business owners or managers themselves about our experiences. Furthermore, if customers go straight online to vent their frustrations, businesses have little chance of turning around customers' complaints.

And Paul, who was also a brand expert, noticed that there was no trusted feedback brand. There was an opportunity for such an independent brand to indicate to consumers which businesses actively welcomed feedback and were prepared to listen. Customers might trust an independent brand which could guarantee customers a good experience when sharing feedback.

So we - Paul and Helen - put our heads together to form Niggle. Niggle exists because:

• Customers increasingly like to feel involved in businesses they use, and have their say. But customers need an easy, unembarrassing way to give feedback and suggestions to businesses which gives them faith that their feedback will get to the right person. And for those customers who love to help businesses, how about creating a special social network where they can get rewarded for their input by businesses with offers and incentives?
  
  
• Businesses need structured, relevant feedback about their customers' experiences, which is private, but allows them to respond to customers and even reward them to turn feedback into loyalty. They need a feedback channel which is easy and quick to manage, and easy to analyse, but at the same time highly relevant because it can be customised to their particular business. And if businesses could access and reward a pool of customers who love giving feedback, so much the better for their business!
  
  
• Modern technology such as text messaging and the internet, can overcome the shortcomings of the comment card and capture the thoughts that occur to customers while they are on the premises, whilst ensuring customer anonymity by allowing private confidential conversations between businesses and customers.
  
  

Niggle today

We're just getting going here at Niggle, but we've got big plans to be the UK's most visible customer feedback brand. We're looking for businesses to trial our service, and we'd love to hear your ideas too. Contact us

To keep up with what we're up to, see our News page.

What we believe in

Here at Niggle we believe in:

• Involving customers and improving businesses. By asking customers for feedback and using that feedback to create relationships, conversations and improvements.
  
  
• Optimism. We're an optimistic, idealistic company. We tend to look on the bright side and approach everything with a "can do" attitude, putting our customers - and their customers - first and always trying to serve them brilliantly.
  
  
• Ideas. We're an ideas company, priding ourselves on being innovative and different, and we're always open to new ideas and suggestions. We practise what we preach and we love to talk to our customers, potential customers, partners, suppliers or others who use our service. Contact Us here.
  
  
• Being responsible. Finally we're proud of the fact that we're doing our best to be a responsible company, from the very outset. That includes a commitment to furthering sustainability, and treating customers, suppliers and employees fairly. If you want to know more, read our Social Responsibility page (it's actually quite interesting and we've spent time thinking about this!).
  
  

Inspired and want to work with us? Check out our Careers page, as we'd love to talk to you!