Upwork is the world’s work marketplace where every day businesses of all sizes and independent talent from around the globe meet to accomplish incredible things.
Katie Hurley, Vice President of Marketing at unitQ, recently spoke with Shennaver Canasa to learn more about her use of unitQ at Upwork, where her role is C360 Advocacy PSO/CX Manager.
A transcription of their discussion, edited for clarity and length, follows:
Katie: So let’s start by digging into your background. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Upwork and what Upwork does as a company?
Shennaver: I’m one of the CX managers here at Upwork. I’ve been at Upwork for a little over six years. My time here has been a combination of being in operations, customer retention, and recently now part of a team that represents the voice of the customer to build actionable insights for the company.
Katie: So can you tell us how unitQ has transformed the way that Upwork makes sense of user feedback?
Shennaver: unitQ gave me and my team the ability to get a full view of the most significant customer pain points across a variety of sources. And to top that off, having that real-time feedback really brought our efficiency level to the top. What I mean by that is, I’m able to get any escalations really front and center in order to avoid any type of potential disruptions in our platform.I can now simply understand the why, when, and how of an issue? When in our customer journey does this happen? This is such a critical part of the process of how we analyze our user data now.
Katie: How does unitQ influence your ability to work more collaboratively with other teams — if you think about maybe Product, or Engineering, CX and Support?
Customer obsession
Shennaver: Yeah, that’s a great question. Customer obsession is at the core of every decision here at Upwork and unitQ has been my go to for all things customer insights.
We recently released a platform and mobile app update in our network. And hours after launching, unitQ alerted us of a potential issue because of an unusual spike in customer sentiment. Our Engineering Team saw it in unitQ first, and they were able to see the breakdown of the sources where it was coming from. From understanding the data that unitQ was providing us, our engineering team was able to resolve it quickly to minimize the impact to our users.
Katie: Something we obsess about at unitQ is product quality — the quality of experience as a whole. When you think about Upwork and wanting to deliver an amazing experience for your users, what does product quality mean to you?
Shennaver: Customer obsession is at the core of everything that’s happening at Upwork. So that strong relationship between customer experience and retention is aligning within each other. With unitQ being able to dive into the root cause of how, and when, and why our customers are rating us a certain way, we’re then able to translate that into actionable insights. And from there, we can then solidify some recommendations on really how to improve the quality of experience in our product.
Katie: What do you see as having the most positive impact on Upwork post implementation of unitQ?
Shennaver: Upwork being the world’s marketplace, we’re funneling through a couple thousand pieces of user feedback on a daily basis. Let me repeat that — a couple thousand. So aggregating this manually would have been riddled with human error. And with unitQ coming into play, we’re able to segment this data so seamlessly and able to provide validated data in front of the proper product owners to be able to let them know where in the customer journey and where it is in the product experience that we are experiencing some gaps in the platform. That really has improved the way we’ve been able to drive a better business case.
Katie: How would you describe the old way of doing things before unitQ?
Shennaver: Before unitQ, much of my team and I didn’t really have much of a categorization process to identify potential issues at hand. We were aggregating this manually, and it was very time consuming. It would take us hours, if not days, to be able to understand one theme that our customers were really saying about us.
Katie: If you think about surveys, I’m imagining they’re not completely gone from Upwork’s workstream. But how do surveys interrelate to unitQ?
Shennaver: So we do have surveys that are funneling into unitQ. And being able to isolate this particular source of data, it’s really helped us navigate into the actual repeated trends that we are seeing in the platform. So there could be a mixture or a combination of Support tickets versus just forums. And with the survey, we’re really asking a really straightforward question rather than trying to navigate through just a source of customers sharing their thoughts and feedback with us.
Katie: It’s been great to chat with you. Thanks so much for your time.
Shennaver: Yeah. Nice meeting you again, Katie.
About unitQ
As the leading Quality Automation platform,
unitQ
empowers companies with AI-powered, actionable insights from user feedback to help them craft high-quality products, services and experiences. unitQ centralizes feedback from all sources and automatically groups it into thousands of granular categories to help organizations discover what matters most to users — all in real time. Category-leading companies like Spotify,
Bumble,
Pinterest,
Udemy
and
HelloFresh
rely on unitQ to drive growth, reduce churn and build brand loyalty.
With unitQ customer feedback software,
including unitQ GPT, organizations can discover quality issues at the same time as their users. Know what product launches, releases or evergreen features are causing the most bugs or support tickets. Drill into the root causes of these issues by source, platform, device, customer segment and more.
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David Kravets is Senior Content Marketing Manager at unitQ
