Wantoo Success Story

How This Enterprise e-Commerce Company is Future-Proofing Its Feedback

Rock legend and Nobel laureate Bob Dylan said it best: the times, they are a-changin’. As its name suggests, Elastic Path doesn’t just help your company handle the average Black Friday madness — this enterprise e-commerce software provider gets you ready for the evolution of how business gets done around the world today, tomorrow, and the day after that. Any touchpoint. Any front end. Any backend or legacy system. “Our basic model is that we work with partners to deliver enterprise solutions,” says David Clark, Elastic Path’s Technical Product Manager. Elastic Path’s customers include major retail, media, and financial-software companies.

As is usually the case for an e-commerce company, Elastic Path serves a two-sided market, says Clark: “It’s a split in terms of the e-commerce solutions. Split between B2B and B2C.” The go-to-market strategy we have is that we’re partnering with major digital agencies and consulting firms like PriceWaterhouseCoopers. They bring us in and we team up to implement the projects.”

‘Simple’ Doesn’t Always Mean ‘Basic’

This means that the product roadmap is prone to twists, turns, and the occasional repaving. “Earlier this year we decided on Aha! as our core product management software,” says Clark. “It provides a wide range of functionality that we really like. Things like roadmap, Jira integration, and customer portals to capture ideas. All that is really good, but it misses the ad-hoc surveys and discussions on focused topics. There’s a general ideas portal but it’s hard to get focused feedback on discussions like your next release, or feedback from an advisory group. It’s that focused feedback that Wantoo really seemed to fit the need for.”

Elastic Path is using Wantoo in two separate instances: for its marketing efforts and its product feedback management. “We tried a couple of other product management tools, but they were just really hard to use,” says Clark. “This is the area where Wantoo really fills the gap.”

Beyond ease of use, Clark and his team needed respondents to be able to draw outside the lines: “We used Surveymonkey, but it’s not a great tool, because people can’t add ideas which leads to a higher level of discussion. You can’t focus the feedback. It’s general voting and commenting, but you want to get much more specific feedback for concrete decision making.”

Meeting of the Minds

Elastic Path used Wantoo internally, leveraging the insights of two focused internal groups within the company, whose staff numbers around 100. Clark is an experienced enough manager to know what he doesn’t know, and to know how to shed light on those unknowns: “I compared it to the alternatives that I knew about. We couldn’t have done this with Aha! and Surveymonkey. I got great feedback. I got the kind of feedback that would have just been much more awkward to get otherwise.”

Elastic Path found Wantoo first as a user and the team decided to take the platform for a spin of its own. “Setup was pretty easy,” recalls Clark. After spending a few moments setting up the first Wantoo Board, he sent out the link along with a handcrafted intro and follow-up: “We got the first response within about ten minutes.”

The Future is Surprisingly Simple

Elastic Path was able to match the speed with which knowledge — and industries — move by making it not only easy to gather feedback and ideas from people with crucial insights, but also even fun. “It’s a cool, simple app! It was easy to use and it served a nice purpose,” says Clark. “I just liked the number of spontaneous ideas that were added. The fact that it’s not a constrained list, ever. It just leads to much better discussions.”

What worked for Elastic Path can also work for you. Try Wantoo for free today.

About Wantoo

Wantoo is a simple, powerful cloud-based platform that makes it easy to listen, analyze, and act on feedback from your team, your customers, or anyone else. For more information, visit wantoo.io.