On Sunday, I reported that a customer experience company called SocialSurvey was in the process of rebranding to one of the most powerful domain names for its industry, Experience.com.
The switchover from SocialSurvey.com to Experience.com officially happened on Monday, and Experience.com’s CEO Scott Harris phoned into the Lykken on Lending show to talk about the rebrand, with the interview starting around the 34-minute mark.
The team started to consider rebranding after realizing that the company’s product offerings and roadmap for the future started to outgrow its original name. “This thing is not SocialSurvey anymore,” Scott explained, and followed that up by stating “this is the best platform, we deserve the best name.”
Harris didn’t go into too much detail about how many names SocialSurvey considered, or their criteria, but it seems like his team kept returning to Experience.
“The name that we kept coming back to was the name of the category itself. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just be Experience?”
The team started exploring the possibility of acquiring Experience.com, but at the time, Harris says that the price was high.
“Experience[.com] wasn’t for sale. They weren’t using it […] but they were like ‘$8 million.’ […] I can’t believe somebody didn’t buy it for $8 million.”
According to Scott, the seller was ready to divest later in 2020, justifying the price by saying “it wasn’t inexpensive but when you think about CX [customer experience], last year, $510 billion was spent on CX tech.”
Scott Harris then revealed that he quickly approved the purchase of Experience.com for ‘close to a million bucks.’
“When they came back to us with a price, they said it was going to cost this much – close to a million bucks, and I thought about it for a second and I said ‘yeah, buy it’ […] So, unbelievably, we are Experience.com”
Harris later fielded questions from listeners, with the first audience member starting with a compliment about the company’s new domain “I’m at the website now. How amazing to have Experience.com.”
Scott responded by saying “I keep pinching myself. It’s such a big thing for my company and even though it was a tremendous investment, it feels like nothing compared to all the value we are already getting.”
What a quote.
Great article James and an even better quote at the end! Great when an end user realizes that a name like this is an “investment” and that while expensive- is extremely valuable- and is opening up doors for them already!
Thanks, Mike! Yes – a great quote at the end 🙂