From feedback overload to focused strategy: Firstup’s winning formula

Understanding and acting on customer feedback is a universal problem for businesses. And Firstup, an industry-leading intelligent communication platform focused on reaching every worker with personalized communications at scale, is no exception. 

‍

Since their users are some of the most well-known brands in the world—the likes of Toyota, JetBlue, Kraft Heinz, to name a few—customer feedback is not something Firstup takes lightly.  

‍

But with multiple feedback avenues, lack of data-driven insights, and an overreliance on subjective prioritization that created inefficiencies, Firstup recognized they needed to do things differently. 

‍

Through their search for better feedback management, they found Unwrap and never looked back.

The headache of trying to find patterns within disparate data

Firstup allows businesses to communicate with their employees in smart and innovative ways. Taking an omni-channel approach to personalized communications, Firstup’s intelligent communication platform provides for a seamless employee experience. 

‍

Like any SaaS company, Firstup collects customer feedback from businesses—and their employees—that they service. And that’s where things became complicated. 

‍

Firstup was struggling to identify overarching themes in the heaps of feedback they were receiving, and the product and customer success teams found themselves constrained by a lack of actionable data.

‍

Not to mention, the data itself was scattered. Support tickets, feature requests, and customer feedback were collected in different systems like Zendesk and Gong. Despite the CS team’s attempts to highlight trends, the lack of a unified platform hindered their ability to discern clear priorities, resulting in reactive decision-making and reduced product impact.

‍

“We didn't have a process by which we could sit down and say, ‘Okay, what are the overarching theme(s) that we're seeing across feedback and support tickets that we’re receiving?’,” says Kensley Wigginton, product operations director at Firstup. 

“The other thing that we consistently ran into is the ‘shiny object syndrome.’ Whatever the perceived big deal was at that moment, that was the item that was getting prioritized—even though it might not necessarily drive the strongest results.”

‍

Instead of immediate but less impactful issues taking precedence, Wigginton and her team wanted data-backed information to guide prioritization.

‍

Understanding what is and isn’t a priority 

One important channel in Firstup’s platform is their email solution—a tool that allows businesses to design, segment and automate, deliver, and measure internal emails that their employees receive. So, after onboarding Unwrap, the Firstup team decided to investigate customer feedback related to this widely used functionality. 

‍

“Email is always going to be a main type of communication used throughout an organization. It’s not that we didn't know there were challenges with the way we were addressing our email product feedback, we just didn't know where to start. It would ping pong between, ‘This is an issue, oh but now this is an issue,’ which made true prioritization hard.”

‍

Plus, the feedback they were relying on was only reflective of a small sub-set of customers.

“The product feedback was only from customers who are talking to us. We couldn’t capture holistically all the underlying data we know lives in our support tickets—issues that we maybe wouldn’t have had any clue about.”

‍

With Unwrap, all feedback streams were centralized, providing real-time visibility into customer sentiment and trends. Product managers were able to leverage Unwrap to validate priorities, focusing on areas with the highest potential impact.

‍

“Our lead PM looking to make enhancements to our email product can go into Unwrap and easily find which areas are going to provide the most value. He can confidently say, ‘These are the top five areas we need to focus on.’ It’s data driven, not emotion driven.”

‍

Discovering unknown unknowns—and acting on them 

Another area where Unwrap helped the Firstup team uncover opportunities for growth was in regard to educating their customers on how to extract value from certain areas of their platform—namely their workplace insights data. 

‍

“We have some of the best data that communication professionals and enterprise organizations can use as it relates to their employee engagement and internal communications. But what we didn’t realize is we need to do a better job helping our customers understand how to use that data."

"Some trends we found in Unwrap weren’t a product issue, but an issue around how we enable our customers to derive value from the insights we were providing to them.” 

‍

Lack of knowledge around what to do with Firstup’s workforce intelligence data was an issue that a separate team, the support team, in the organization had received tickets about—but they didn’t have the data to fully understand the scope of the problem. 

‍

“We kept getting ticket after ticket related to our insights. But we didn’t know what to do about it. Through Unwrap, we could really expose the problem to the leadership team and help them understand the breadth of what was going on—that an outsized portion of our customers didn’t know what to do with the enriched data we were providing to them.”

‍

When you have something good, other teams want in

Through word of mouth, other teams within Firstup have begun to take notice of Unwrap. 

‍

“Pretty organically people are starting to find out about Unwrap and the different systems that are hooked into it. They've actually been coming to me asking, ‘Hey, do you mind if I have access to that?’ or “Could I just take a peek and see what's going on in there?’”

‍

Almost every team within a company can use customer insights to better their function. It’s when you look at customer feedback patterns at scale that everything can really come together. 

‍

Take marketing for example: 

‍

“I think we have a lot of opportunity when it comes to things like our pricing and packaging. We have Gong integrated with Unwrap, so it could be easy for our product marketing team to start aggregating some feedback that they hear from prospect or customer calls around what works and doesn’t work for them in that area.”

‍

There’s untapped value in customer feedback. Unwrap will help you find it—fast.

‍

See Unwrap.ai in action for Airbnb, Amazon's Alexa, and Capital One today.