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

Mario Ciabarra

Quantum Metric is a platform that provides technology that empowers customer-centric organisations to design and evolve their digital products, i.e. websites, apps, kiosks etc. When I founded Quantum Metric back in 2015, my aim was to help organisations quantify the impact of issues on their digital experiences.

On the journey from then to now, I discovered digital experiences are much more complex than just the code that’s written to create them. The experiences are defined by teams of people, from marketing to product, UX Design, Dev, Ops, analytics, executives and often more, which makes it difficult for some organisations to do the simplest of things: understanding their customers and getting to the heart of their needs.

Today our platform allows businesses to not only see how customers behave, but understand the why behind that behaviour – enabling organisations to empathise with their customers, quantify those moments, and align their organisation on how to deliver their best in support of their customers’ journeys.

This has evolved to the point that we’re definitively helping companies build not just digital products, but cultures that are maniacally focused on winning the hearts of their customers.
 
 
Quantum Metric
 

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 assist customers in person when they were frustrated or needed help choosing a colour or a size. Fast forward to our world of digital, I began to wonder how it would be possible to offer that same, high-level customer experience I was able to deliver in-store through digital platforms.

I observed, that due to the speed and scale of the eCommerce sector, many organisations were struggling to bring that same empathy and care they had for customers in the physical store to their online brand. However, if we could access real-time insight into what was actually happening in the customer experience and why – we can better understand customers and take actions centred around their needs. This inevitably has a positive financial impact, but it’s not financing that’s driving it, it’s customer empathy.

It also occurred to me that a key flaw with popular analytics tools is that they operate in a silo. While these domains can help individual teams in a business to identify areas in need of improvement, there is no clear way to provide true visibility into customer friction points for the business as a whole. Nor was there one way of knowing which of the siloed data sources was more important, or ‘more true’ than the others.

We evolved Quantum Metric to provide organisations with that visibility, so teams can align on understanding where the biggest issues are for the company and work together to improve customer experience – in turn, driving greater revenue through increased brand loyalty. In reality, it does much more than that, allowing smaller, or non-digital-first companies to act as customer-centric as the largest eCommerce businesses out there.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
The pandemic was a pivotal turning point for the digital acceleration of businesses. Lockdowns meant that face-to-face business was no longer an option, so Quantum Metric saw an increase in clients seeking help to grow their eCommerce and digital customer service offerings. Fortunately for us, this meant that Quantum Metric’s revenue soared throughout the pandemic, almost doubling in 2020 versus 2019. We also doubled our number of employees during that time.

By the start of 2021, Quantum Metric secured its place as a tech unicorn with an above $1 billion valuation and a $200 million Series B funding round. 2021 was another huge year. In EMEA alone, we grew our customer business by 900%, and our employee base grew by 700%.

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

What can we hope to see from Quantum Metric in the future?

 
For Quantum Metric, our number one priority for the future is happy people and a healthy, diverse culture. Creating a positive and inclusive workspace where people love coming to work, and delivering on a shared mission is what brings me the most pride.

Of course, we have very ambitious goals beyond a phenomenal workplace, and I’m personally excited about our European expansion continuing beyond the teams we have now in place in Germany, Spain and the UK, helping to further our international expansion.