How Descript bridges quantitative and qualitative insights to innovate for millions of users

Tiffany Go

Head of Product Marketing

June 14, 2024

Descript is revolutionizing video and podcast editing, making it simple, powerful, and fun for creators everywhere. Millions of users love Descript for its versatility, ease of use, and relentless innovation.

At Descript, listening to customers and acting on their feedback isn't just spoken about—it's part of the company’s DNA. We had the pleasure of chatting with Mike McNasby, User Research Lead, and Jil McKinney, Director of Customer Support, who are championing the voice of the customer in everything Descript does.

Struggling with Siloed Feedback and Access to Insights

In 2023, Descript’s user base skyrocketed to millions, and consolidating feedback and surfacing insights became increasingly challenging. The team faced several hurdles:

Siloed Feedback: Customer feedback was fragmented across tickets, calls, and surveys.
Inefficient Analysis: Manual feedback management was a time-suck and labor-intensive.
Limited Cross-functional Access: Only certain teams could access certain sets of feedback
Breaking through Noise: Surfacing insights from large volumes of feedback felt impossible.

Enterpret Bridges Quantitative and Qualitative for a Complete Customer View

Descript chose Enterpret for its ability to provide comprehensive, easily accessible insights with minimal training. "Tools like Enterpret are critical for teams striving to build with their customers," says Mike.

The team at Descript is using Enterpret to:

Centralize Feedback Management: By consolidating data from over 15 sources, Enterpret offers a holistic view of the customer, complete with summaries and custom alerts.
Separate Signal from Noise: Enterpret helps distinguish the signal from the noise, making it easier to uncover valuable insights.
Democratize Access to Insights: Teams across research, product, support, engineering, and QA at Descript now have immediate access to insights in Enterpret.
Understand “The Why”: Whether addressing performance issues, analyzing feature usage, or conducting research, Enterpret provides the structure to delve into insights or conduct ad hoc research.

The Impact of Unlocking a Complete View of Customers

Mike shares, "Enterpret has transformed our research and customer insights process, making it collaborative and inclusive.” Jil adds, “Whenever someone asks for insights, I direct them to Enterpret!”

83% Faster Research Synthesis

‍“Before Enterpret, organizing research data took an entire day. Now, research synthesis is 83% faster - it takes just 15 minutes to pull the data and another 15 minutes to start synthesizing. Enterpret removes the manual work, allowing me to focus on strategic thinking with a clear mind.” says Mike.

Wisdom Saves Hours Weekly

Wisdom is Enterpret's copilot for customer insights and Jil is a power user. Jil shares, "Wisdom saves me hours every week. With 'Summarize with Wisdom,' I can condense feedback with a single click, replacing the tedious process of reading through hundreds of tickets. It’s life-changing!”

Connecting Quant and Qual for Actionable Insights‍

Bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative is possible thanks toEnterpret's integration with Amplitude. Mike explains, "Enterpret helps us triangulate trends and double-click into them. Recently, an engineer used Enterpret to investigate performance issues by analyzing support tickets segmented by Amplitude cohorts They identified specific browsers and versions causing issues and shipped fixes quickly." Jil adds, “Enterpret is my go-to over Zendesk Explore for analyzing support tickets. It allows me to isolate certain support tickets or enrich data from various sources, providing a true 360-degree view of our customers.”

Collaborative Engagement in Feedback

‍"Enterpret democratizes customer insights by putting calls and conversations from different teams on the same level as user research and making it accessible," Mike notes. “Everyone can keep a pulse on customer sentiment. When writing a research report, I can pull in snippets from conversations, Grain sales calls, and Zendesk support tickets. PMs can do the same when gathering feedback for a PRD. ”

Jill recalls, “The Product and Support teams recently needed to understand the impact of an A/B test. Support noticed increased mentions of a particular feature due to the test, but we needed data to confirm it. Enterpret’s Anomaly reports identified a spike (a drastic one) in tickets related to that feature. This data and customer feedback helped the Product team decide to end the test and ship the feature.”

Looking to the Future: Unlocking Deeper Insights

Descript is set to take customer understanding to the next level with Enterpret's Synced Users and Accounts feature. This functionality will give the team a richer, more comprehensive view of customer journeys, including key phases like activation and onboarding. Integrating real-time user and account attributes will provide Descript with deeper insights, allowing for more precise and impactful product development.

Our partnership with Mike, Jil, and the Descript team have been instrumental in shaping Enterpret. We are incredibly grateful to work with a team so genuinely committed to listening to their users. As Descript continues to innovate in the video and podcasting space, we are excited to support them every step of the way!

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Wisdom saves me hours every week. With 'Summarize with Wisdom,' I can condense feedback with a single click, replacing the tedious process of reading through hundreds of tickets. It’s life-changing!

Jil McKinney

Director of Customer Support, Descript

Before Enterpret, organizing research data took an entire day. Now, research synthesis is 83% faster - it takes just 15 minutes to pull the data and another 15 minutes to start synthesizing. Enterpret removes the manual work, allowing me to focus on strategic thinking with a clear mind.

Mike McNasby

User Research Lead, Descript

We are laser-focused on giving customers more than they expect through a hospitality-first, individualized approach to drive retention and loyalty. Enterpret has allowed us to stitch together a full picture of the customer, including feedback and reviews from multiple data points. We now can super-serve our loyal customers in a way that we have never been able to before.

Anna Esrov

Vice President of Customer Experience & Loyalty

Enterpret allowed us to listen to specific issues and come closer to our Members - prioritizing feedback which needed immediate attention, when it came to monitoring reception of new releases: Enterpret picked up insights for new updates and became the eyes of whether new systems and functionality were working well or not.

Louise Sellars

Analyst, Customer Insights

Enterpret is one of the most powerful tools in our toolkit. It's very Member-friendly. We've been able to share how other teams can modify and self-serve in Enterpret. It's bridged a gap to getting access to Member feedback, and I see all our teams finding ways to use Enterpret to answer Member-related questions.

Dina Mohammad-Laity

VP of Data

The big win-win is our VoC program enabled us to leverage our engineering resources to ship significantly awesome and valuable features while minimizing bug fixes and" keep the lights on" work. Magnifying and focusing on the 20% that causes the impact is like finding the needle in a haystack, especially when you have issues coming from all over the place

Abishek Viswanathan

CPO, Apollo.io

Since launching our Voice of Customer program six months ago, our team has dropped our human inquiry rate by over 40%, improved customer satisfaction, and enabled our team to allocate resources to building features that increase LTV and revenue.

Abishek Viswanathan

CPO, Apollo.io

Enterpret's Gong Integration is a game changer on so many levels. The automated labeling of feedback saves dozens of hours per week. This is essential in creating a customer feedback database for analytics.

Michael Bartimer

Revenue Operations Lead

Enterpret has made it so much easier to understand our customer feedback. Every month I put together a Voice of Customer report on feedback trends. Before Enterpret it would take me two weeks - with Enterpret I can get it done in 3 days.

Maya Bakir

Product Operations, Notion

The Enterpret platform is like the hero team of data analysts you always wanted - the ability to consolidate customer feedback from diverse touch points and identify both ongoing and emerging trends to ensure we focus on and build the right things has been amazing. We love the tools and support to help us train the results to our unique business and users and the Enterpret team is outstanding in every way.

Larisa Sheckler

COO, Samsung Food

Enterpret makes it easy to understand and prioritize the most important feedback themes. Having data organized in one place, make it easy to dig into the associated feedback to deeply understand the voice of customer so we can delight users, solve issues, and deliver on the most important requests.

Lauren Cunningham

Head of Support and Ops

With Enterpret powering Voice of Customer we're democratizing feedback and making it accessible for everyone across product, customer success, marketing, and leadership to provide evidence and add credibility to their strategies and roadmaps.

Michael Nguyen

Head of Research Ops and Insights, Figma

Boll & Branch takes pride in being a data driven company and Enterpret is helping us unlock an entirely new source of data. Enterpret quantifies our qualitative data while still keeping customer voice just a click away, adding valuable context and helping us get a more complete view of our customers.

Matheson Kuo

Senior Product Analyst, Boll & Branch

Enterpret has transformed our ability to use feedback to prioritize customers and drive product innovation. By using Enterpret to centralize our data, it saves us time, eliminates manual tagging, and boosts accuracy. We now gain near real-time insights, measure product success, and easily merge feedback categories. Enterpret's generative AI technology has streamlined our processes, improved decision-making, and elevated customer satisfaction

Nathan Yoon

Business Operations, Apollo.io

Enterpret helps us have a holistic view from our social media coverage, to our support tickets, to every single interaction that we're plugging into it. Beyond just keywords, we can actually understand: what are the broader sentiments? What are our users saying?

Emma Auscher

Global VP of Customer Experience, Notion

The advantage of Enterpret is that we’re not relying entirely on human categorization. Enterpret is like a second brain that is looking out for themes and trends that I might not be thinking about.

Misty Smith

Head of Product Operations, Notion

As a PM, I want to prioritize work that benefits as many of our customers as possible. It can be too easy to prioritize based on the loudest customer or the flavor of the moment. Because Enterpret is able to compress information across all of our qualitative feedback sources, I can make decisions that are more likely to result in positive outcomes for the customer and our business.

Duncan Stewart

Product Manager

We use Enterpret for our VoC & Root Cause Elimination Program - Solving the issues of aggregating disparate sources of feedback (often tens of thousands per month) and distilling it into specific reasons, with trends, so we can see if our product fixes are reducing reasons.