VoC Expert Insights: Jil McKinney and Mike McNasby from Descript

Tiffany Go

Head of Product Marketing

February 5, 2025

At our latest Voice of Customer meetup, Michael our Head of Customer Insights sat down with Jil, the Director of Customer Support, and Mike, Head of Research at Descript, to uncover how they built a systematic approach to Voice of Customer (VoC) and how it fuels their success.

Descript, is an AI-powered platform that simplifies video editing. Their team deeply understands that true customer centricity isn't just a program—it's a system. Mike explained that the biggest challenge he's seen is the lack of systems for gathering and acting on customer feedback. One-off projects and ad-hoc analysis are time-consuming and often lead to decisions based on gut feeling rather than hard evidence.

Descript's solution?

Building systems that empower everyone in the organization to access and utilize customer insights. This collaborative approach ensures that product managers, support teams, and researchers alike are plugged into the VoC loop.

Watch a recording of the full meetup here:

‍

The Power of Speed and Collaboration

Jil emphasized the importance especially with Descript's bi-weekly releases. Having systems in place to quickly gather and disseminate feedback is crucial for responding to rapid changes and understanding customer sentiment. This speed has forced Descript to rethink traditional VoC approaches, moving away from quarterly reports to a more agile, on-demand system.

Mike shared how Descript uses a weekly "Insight Safari" where the entire company is invited to watch recordings of user sessions. This creates a shared understanding of customer struggles and sparks immediate action. Combined with tools like Enterpret, which aggregates feedback from support tickets, surveys, reviews, and research sessions, Descript has created a central hub for all customer data.

This unified system enables Descript to connect the emotional impact of watching a user struggle with hard data, driving faster action and more informed decisions. It also allows them to quickly assess the scope of an issue and prioritize improvements.

The Push and Pull of Insights

Descript balances pushing and pulling information. Support creates monthly "Voice of Customer" reports, including a short, engaging video for all-hands meetings, highlighting key trends. This sparks interest and encourages employees to delve deeper into a Notion database populated with insights from Enterpret.

On the research side, Mike's team uses Enterpret to enrich their findings, triangulating data from various sources. This allows them to quickly understand the scope and pain points of different issues, informing prioritization and roadmap planning.

Building a Dynamic Duo

Descript's collaborative culture is a key ingredient in their VoC success. Jil and Mike’s partnership allows them to combine quantitative and qualitative data, creating a holistic view of the customer experience. They recommend that other leaders looking to build similar programs focus on bringing all customer data into one system from the beginning, rather than starting small and expanding. This avoids missing crucial insights and fosters a more comprehensive understanding of the customer and other teams.

‍Key Advice from the Descript Team

Systems over Programs: Focus on building systems for gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, rather than just implementing a VoC program.
Timing is Everything: Speed is crucial. Think about how your VoC system can help keep up and support rapid releases and changes.
Collaboration is Key: Break down silos and empower everyone in the organization to access and utilize customer insights.
Unify Your Data: Bring all customer feedback into one central system to get a complete picture of the customer experience.
Balance Push and Pull: Proactively share key insights while also providing easy access to deeper data for those who want to explore further.

Descript's approach to VoC is a testament to the power of systems thinking and collaboration. By prioritizing accessibility, speed, and a holistic view of the customer, they’ve created a truly customer-centric culture.

The Future of VoC is Now

‍Descript’s journey showcases the shift from VoC as a static program to a dynamic, company-wide system. Instead of playing catch-up with customer insights, they’ve created a culture where VoC is a continuous, real-time loop that informs everything from product decisions to customer support strategies.

A very special thanks to Jil and Mike for sharing their insights!

We chose Enterpret for its intuitive UI and seamless data integrations, which enable us to combine data from all sources and generate deep, multi-layered insights. The Enterpret team ensured a smooth onboarding experience, even increasing data ingestion cadence to provide real-time alerts. The insights we've gained are already driving meaningful change across our organization, and their responsive support and collaborative approach have been invaluable.

Nir Ben Ari

Director, Customer Support, Vimeo

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. It's helping us solve 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 delivering impact.