A group of University of Pretoria (UP) students has created a free app called Letterbox, a customer engagement platform that provides businesses with constructive feedback – and which already has 25 clients on board, including Ocean Basket, Varsity Bakery and Domino’s Pizza.  

“Organisations need feedback about their products and services in order to constantly improve their customer offerings,” says Ngoni Mujuru, CEO of Letterbox and a Computer Science honours student. The aim of Letterbox is to assist companies build better relationships with their clients.

The app allows organisations to create virtual letterboxes. When users open the app, they are greeted by a list of letterboxes for companies near their current location, and can post suggestions, compliments or complaints in these letterboxes. The app then notifies an organisation of a post so they can engage with the customer. They can offer an official response to the post or initiate a private chat with the person who posted it.

“Letterbox also allows organisations to engage with their customers through Letterbox stories – they can post promotions, events or any other important announcements to their customer base,” Mujuru explains. “These stories work like Instagram stories or WhatsApp status updates, with two key differences: they are open, allowing anyone on the platform to see them, and they are location-based, ensuring that one gets the most relevant information at any given time.”

The idea to create this app came to Mujuru as a result of his time as an auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2014/15. “I realised that companies really value customer feedback. Some would say ‘send us an email’ or ‘go to our website’ for suggestions and comments, yet all these different ways of giving feedback really inconvenience customers. At the end of the day organisations were not receiving sufficient feedback.”

In a competition hosted by TuksNovation last year, Letterbox won the prize for Best Tech Startup at the University of Pretoria, and has since been developed by the business incubator. The team won R10 000 as well as a year-long incubation period that includes office space, mentorship and business training to assist the Letterbox founders develop their product even further.

Letterbox will soon charge companies a fixed monthly fee of R399 and there will be other packages based on usage. “Our ultimate goal as a team is to have all the organisations that provide products and services using the platform and to democratise good customer service around the world,” Mujuru says.

Over the past two months, more than 100 stories have been posted and there have been more than 3000 views. The app also has more than 1 000 users and this is steadily growing. What’s more, the team committed not to get any full-time jobs this year in order to focus on developing the platform – that commitment is sure to pay off.

Letterbox is available on Android, iOS and the web.