Customer relations platform ServiceDock acquired by Critizr

27 Jan 2021

ServiceDock founders Leonardo Correa and Oisin Ryan. Image: ServiceDock

The Dublin start-up had raised €500,000 from backers and counted a number of large brands among its clients.

ServiceDock, an Irish start-up that has developed a customer feedback platform, has been acquired by French company Critizr.

The ServiceDock platform is used by retail businesses to manage their customer relations and gather data from customers through messaging apps like Facebook’s Messenger.

The Dublin-based start-up was founded in 2016 by Leonardo Correa and Oisin Ryan. It had raised €500,000 from Enterprise Ireland and angel investors including CapF9 Ventures founder Barry Brennan.

France’s Critizr, which develops similar products for customer engagement, said it will be integrating ServiceDock’s products with its own to fuel its push into the Irish and UK markets. No financial terms for the acquisition have been disclosed. The French company has raised more than $18m from investors to date, with backing from 83North and Runa Capital.

Aurélien Dubot, VP of marketing at Critizr, said businesses are challenged in keeping up with the various digital channels for communicating with customers.

“Our acquisition of ServiceDock is an exciting next step in providing the best solution on the market for our clients to meet this challenge. ServiceDock’s small but very impressive team has created game-changing social conversation technology which will integrate seamlessly to augment our successful Critizr Connection platform,” Dubot said.

Ryan, who is CEO of ServiceDock, added that messaging apps have become one of the most important ways for companies to correspond with customers and maintain relationships.

“These apps are ideal for connecting consumers to the product experts in their local store because they offer a persistent connection while consumers are on the go,” he said. “This empowers store staff to deliver a blended physical and digital customer experience that direct-to-consumer retailers cannot match.”

Ryan and his co-founder Correa had previously been with Localmint, the online retail store directory, and left to found ServiceDock in 2016. It built up a stream of clients in Ireland including Mothercare, Eddie Rocket’s, Woodie’s and Sky.

“Messaging will revolutionise physical retail and joining forces with Critizr will put us at the forefront of this movement in a much more meaningful way than we could achieve on our own,” Ryan added.

Jonathan Keane is a freelance business and technology journalist based in Dublin

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