Meet Mario Ciabarra, CEO of Continuous Product Design Platform: Quantum Metric

Quantum Metric is a platform that provides technology that enables customer-centric organizations to design and evolve their digital products i.e. websites, apps, kiosks, etc. When I founded Quantum Metric in 2015, my goal was to help organizations quantify the impact of problems across their digital experiences.

In the journey from then to now, I’ve found that digital experiences are far more complex than just the code that was written to create them. Experiences are defined by teams of people, from Marketing to Product, UX Design, Dev, Ops, Analytics, Executives and often more, making it difficult for some organizations to do the simplest things: understand their customers and respond to the bring point of their needs.

Today, our platform not only enables companies to see how customers behave, but also to understand the why behind that behavior – enabling companies to empathize with their customers, quantify those moments and align their organization to how they are their best can give to support their customers’ journey.

This has evolved to the point that we are definitely helping companies build not just digital products, but cultures that are insanely focused on winning the hearts of their customers.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

As a teenager, I worked in a clothing store where it was easy to personally help customers when they were frustrated or needed help choosing a color or size. Leaping into our digital world, I began to wonder how it would be possible to provide the same high-quality customer experience that I was able to deliver in-store via digital platforms.

I’ve found that due to the speed and scale of the e-commerce sector, many organizations have struggled to transfer the same empathy and care they had for customers in-store to their online brand. However, if we could access real-time insights into what actually happened in the customer experience and why – we can better understand customers and take actions based on their needs. This inevitably has positive financial implications, but it’s not funding that’s driving it, it’s customer empathy.

I’ve also noticed that a major flaw with popular analytics tools is that they work in a silo. While these domains can help individual teams within an organization identify areas for improvement, there’s no unambiguous way to provide the organization as a whole with true insight into customer friction points. There was also no way of knowing which of the isolated data sources was more important or “true” than the others.

We built Quantum Metric to provide organizations with this visibility, so teams can agree to understand where the biggest issues are for the business and work together to improve the customer experience – which in turn leads to increased revenue through increased brand loyalty leads. In reality, it does a lot more than that, allowing smaller or non-digital businesses to be as customer-centric as the biggest ecommerce companies out there.

How has the company performed during the pandemic?

The pandemic was a crucial turning point for the digital acceleration of companies. Lockdowns meant in-person business was no longer an option, so Quantum Metric saw an increase in customers seeking help in expanding their e-commerce and digital customer service offerings. Luckily for us, that meant Quantum Metric’s revenue skyrocketed during the pandemic, nearly doubling in 2020 from 2019. We also doubled our number of employees during this time.

In early 2021, Quantum Metric secured its spot as the tech unicorn with a valuation of over $1 billion and a $200 million Series B funding round. 2021 was another big year. In EMEA alone, we have grown our customer base by 900% and our workforce by 700%.

Internally, we’ve always been a geographically dispersed workforce, so working from home hasn’t changed all that much either – in fact, we’ve probably been better placed than most to handle the change well.

What can we expect from Quantum Metric in the future?

For Quantum Metric, happy people and a healthy, diverse culture are our top priority going forward. Creating a positive and inclusive work environment where people enjoy coming to work and fulfilling a common mission is what makes me most proud.

Of course, beyond a phenomenal place to work, we have very ambitious goals and I am personally pleased that our European expansion is moving beyond the teams we now have in Germany, Spain and the UK to fuel our international expansion.