This was ExperienceFellow: researching customer experience in realtime.

ExperienceFellow, priorly called myServiceFellow, was shut down in 2021.
This is the story, the milestones, the success moments.



ExperienceFellow resulted from a university research project in 2007, working title: myServiceFellow. Back then, our co-founder Marc Stickdorn was a research assistant at our partner university Management Center Innsbruck. At that time he was writing his first book, "This is Service Design Thinking".

The vision of the software was to enable qualitative research along the entire customer journey. Using mobile ethnography, participants would document their service experience with a mobile app. The analysis part of the tool was built in a way that enabled researchers also to quantify the research data with a flexible satisfaction score.

We launched the first public version named ExperienceFellow in 2011. It was used in many exciting research projects and we received great reviews by the research community. Tourism, leisure, governmental institutions, FMCG – we are so proud of having contributed to research projects in many amazing projects.

However, the market adoption was not as broad as we would have wished it to be. Qualitative research through mobile ethnography seemed to remain a small niche.

We kept further developing the tool's capabilities until late 2020.

Finally, in March 2021, we decided to shut down ExperienceFellow.

Currently we don't have concrete plans for bringing it back to life, yet. That said, we are researchers at heart, and at some point, there will be a new, better ExperienceFellow.

Instead, we are now putting all our love and effort into further developing our journey mapping tool Smaply.

Smaply helps organizations of all sizes and industries to manage their customers’ experience. With the three main tools – journey maps, personas, and stakeholder maps – users can analyze the customer journey on a high and detailed level, and uncover current pain points and future potential for innovation.

Learn more about Smaply!