The voice of the User
I joined badi a year ago as a Customer Success Specialist to work alongside 40 other colleagues across the company. At the time, the Customer Experience team was made up of 4 awesome people. In short, it was a tiny department in charge of big things: solving and supporting users’ issues and moderating the listings in order to deliver a high quality service to our users.
STARTING WITH A CHALLENGE
My first big challenge was to analyse where we were in terms of user satisfaction and build a process from scratch that would help us grow their love for our product. I was very excited about my new role even though it didn’t seem to be very clearly defined. Despite coming from a corporate setting, I was always attracted to the start-up world, so I was prepared for unexpected situations.
PREMISES…
After some deep research, we realised that we were not analysing all of the metrics we should have been looking at in order to satisfy 100% of our users. I decided to start gathering and categorising feedback from different sources in order to understand the users’ perception of our product. This written feedback proved to be extremely valuable for all our teams as it allowed us to get new ideas from users and improve aspects of our product we had taken for granted. It was this first research that marked the beginning of my journey as a Customer Success Specialist.
Meanwhile, badi continued to grow and soon reached over 1.8 million users. Naturally, this meant even more feedback from our user base. We got more insights, information, ideas and opinions that needed to be analysed and acted upon. So I started looking into how other companies were sharing such vast bodies of information among their internal stakeholders.
THIS IS HOW THE VOICE OF THE USER WAS BORN
The Voice of the User is a quarterly presentation held in our offices where we share the experiences of our users with the entire company in order to make sure everyone understands our users’ perception of our product.
“When we are inside a problem, it’s easy to lose perspective, and my job is to reaffirm our perceptions and provide insights”:
Every quarter we gather user feedback from different sources, such as App Store and Google Play reviews, NPS, CSAT, conversations with the support team, and an occasional survey.
At first we received around 1000 comments per month, so the categorisation could be done manually. I would first read all the comments and conversations, and then tag them to signal what “problem”, “need” or “suggestion” the user had.
Slowly, the user feedback amounted to around 2000 comments per month, which meant we had to look for an alternative to manual categorisation. EnjoyHQ is the tool we opted for and we still use today. It automatically categorises all received comments through a set of rules based on keywords.
The tool also allows us to attach very rich metadata to each comment and conversation that is stored, which helps us understand where the feedback is coming from. We can now go as deep into the analysis as necessary, from a general tag to more specific information, like the author of the comment, localisation of the user, lister vs. seeker, etc.
One interesting observation was to see how users have different opinions on the same product based on the market, and also depending on whether they use the product as a lister (offering a room) or a seeker (looking for a room). These insights are very important to bear in mind in order to fully understand our users no matter who or where they are.
Once the categorisation is done, we look at the metadata to pick the Top 10 comments for any given time frame and present them as a summary during our quarterly presentations. The Voice of the User is intended as a tool for other teams that would help them prioritise their daily and quarterly efforts based on our users’ needs.
The project had a fantastic reception within the company and many other teams got involved. In particular, having the Data team’s contribution in terms of qualitative analysis meant we could have a more effective and powerful impact on the product itself. We now analyse and take the users’ opinions into account for every project we do, and I think that is the key to our success.
We keep learning how to be better at what we do and I am convinced that truly listening to our users is the way to go about it.
“The rocket has just taken off and the best is yet to come”
To answer these and other challenges, we want to build an audacious team of Customer Experience members with the grit to put our users first, join us!
