Just as there are credit scores, restaurant scores and movie scores, one startup tech company wants to implement a quality score for business.

How does today’s modern business know when it has a quality problem with users? There are so many places where user feedback is available now, that it’s become more difficult to capture them all, and this is the problem that unitQ Inc. was founded to address.

“At unitQ, the vision here is to build a quality company to help other companies build higher quality products,” said Christian Wiklund (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of unitQ. “It comes down to how we harness the power of user feedback. How do we capture those signals into something that the company and different teams can align on?”

Wiklund spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin in advance of the June 16 AWS Startup Showcase “MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences” event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how unitQ leverages its emerging technology to improve product quality for brand names in the online world. (* Disclosure below.)

Scores for 5,000 apps

Since it got its start four years ago, unitQ has already built a sizable database of scores that measure data-driven insights from what users are saying about a particular product or service. The firm also publishes a monthly list of the top 25 businesses with the highest user-based quality scores. The hot mobile game Subway Surfers topped the list in June, ahead of Google Photos and Google Drive.

“We actually indexed the 5,000 largest apps out there, looking at all of the public reviews,” Wiklund said. “If your score is 100, it means we are finding no quality issues in the public domain. If your score is 90, it means that 10% of the data we look at refers to a quality issue.”

In the extensive digital world, comments about a business can be found in an increasing variety of sources. These might include sites that publish app reviews, company support desks, chat bot engagements, or posts on social media forums such as Reddit, Twitter and Facebook.

“End users are producing data; they are reporting what’s working and not working out there, in many different channels,” Wiklund noted. “This data is dispersed everywhere. The end user is not going to fill out a perfect bug report in a form somewhere.”

Extracting signals

UnitQ’s solution is to ingest data from anywhere there is user feedback. Through the use of artificial intelligence tools, unitQ automatically tags and analyzes quality issues. The goal is to deliver a comprehensive and accurate view of product quality for a customer.

“What we do is ingest all of that data, the entire surface area of user feedback,” Wiklund explained. “We clean the data, normalize it and translate everything into English. When all of that data is neatly organized, we extract signals from that around what is impacting the user experience right now.”

In an effort to get quickly to the heart of a quality issue, the data collected by unitQ is broken in what the company calls quality “Monitors.” These are specific topics that can be anything that is impacting an end user. UnitQ deploys up to 1,500 unique Monitors per customer, according to Wiklund. The startup then plays a role in galvanizing customer organizations to work together and fix surfaced issues.

“It’s breaking down data silos within the company,” Wiklund said. “It aligns cross-functional teams to agree on what should be fixed next. There is typically a lot of confusion; what we’ve seen is these teams struggle to communicate. We want to catch issues before you go into crisis PR mode. We want to address it early in the cycle.”

Improving store-front conversion

UnitQ’s enterprise customers include financial services company Chime Inc. and NerdWallet Inc., along with streaming music provider Pandora Media LLC, a subsidiary of Sirius XM Holdings Inc. The startup’s data-driven model became listed on the AWS Marketplace platform in March.

The company’s growth can be attributed in part to the clout that ratings have in online reviews. Businesses with a one-star rating are much less likely to grow as fast as those with four or five stars, and companies can see the benefits when quality issues are resolved.

“You’re going to see less support tickets. You’re going to see less one-star reviews,” Wiklund said. “Less one-star reviews is good for making the store front convert better, and quality is a very important piece of that. We see a dramatic impact on how quality moves up and down as a retention function. When quality improves, it supercharges everything else.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s pre-event coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase “MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences” event:

(* Disclosure: UnitQ Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither unitQ nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE