Confessions of a CX Manager: Influencing Product Decisions with Customer Feedback

Key takeaways

• ‍Erin Applebee is a Customer Advocate at Faire, working closely with the Customer Support, Product, and Engineering teams.

• In this interview, she explains how customer feedback plays a crucial role in shaping products from early ideation through to post-launch adjustments. Feedback helps identify key features, prioritize improvements, and refine the product to better meet customer needs.

• The team at Faire emphasizes the importance of both negative and positive feedback. "Negative feedback helps us spot where customers might be struggling—whether they’re confused by something or there’s a clear pain point we could improve. But positive feedback is just as valuable. It shows us what’s working well and what customers appreciate."

• Erin explains how Chattermill has transformed how the entire team analyzes customer feedback, enabling them to easily uncover actionable insights that directly influence product decisions.She highlights how AI streamlines the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback, allowing teams to focus more on strategic decision-making. "One of the main advantages of using AI is the time it saves. I don’t have to search through different tools for feedback; it’s all in one place."

A Conversation with Erin Applebee, Customer Advocate at Faire

Q: Erin, tell me a little bit more about yourself and about the role. What objectives do you have at the moment?

Erin: I’ve been at Faire for almost four years now. I actually started on our Customer Support team, directly answering tickets from our customers. Now, as a Customer Advocate, I ensure that our customers' voices are heard throughout the product development lifecycle. I also help prepare both our customers and our in-house teams for any feature releases.

I have two main objectives. One is ensuring operational readiness for our Customer Support teams. This includes equipping them with the tools and information needed to provide the best possible support—developing policies and procedures, and working with our enablement team to train them.

I also help ensure that customers have all the information they need to use new features. That might be through Help Center articles or in-product FAQs.

The second part of my role is collecting and sharing customer insights. We use data both proactively and reactively. By incorporating customer sentiment and perspective into different stages of the product development process, we can highlight trends and make informed recommendations. This helps shape our product roadmaps, improve contact rate, enhance our virtual assistant, and increase customer satisfaction.

Currently, I support two product workstreams: one focused on improving financial tools for our brands and retailers, and another on optimizing the shipping experience. Both of these teams are launching customer-oriented features this year, which is really exciting.

Q: Wow, that sounds really amazing! This sounds like a very unique role. Something in between customer support and product. 

Erin: It’s definitely somewhere in between. I sit within the Customer Support team, but I work quite closely with Product Managers and Engineering. I'm in this middle space—a common ground between both sides. I get to see things from both perspectives, which is really nice and gives me the chance to collaborate with a lot of different people doing really interesting work.

Q: Which is great—and you're enabling all of them with customer insights. Are you a team of one?

Erin: We’re actually a team of seven Customer Advocates. We all work on different pods, which are the teams focused on different functions across the platform.

Q: What are the areas for you and your team that you're trying to change or improve by using insights from customer feedback?

Erin: It really depends on the specific project I'm working on, the collaborators involved, and the stage of product development.

To give a bit of context—before a feature launch, my focus is usually on understanding how customers are going to use the product. I gather feedback on how customers currently interact with that area, and what kinds of requests we've seen for a feature like this. I might look into current customer pain points around a specific topic or areas they find confusing in an existing feature.

One reason for sharing feedback at this stage is to ensure we’re making improvements based on what customers actually need—what they want, how they’ll use the feature, and how it can help them.

Then, during the launch phase, while collaborating with our enablement team, I like to review past feedback to help anticipate common questions, potential pain points, or edge cases. That way, we can equip our customer support team with the right information to respond to customers directly. It also means making sure that information is reflected in the Help Center or in-product FAQs so customers can easily find answers themselves.

For brand-new features, we also look at similar past projects and how customers reacted to those. Identifying those patterns helps us give more informed insight into how customers might respond this time.

And finally, post-launch, I monitor the feedback coming in from customers who are actively using the feature. If there are issues or outstanding questions, sharing that feedback quickly helps Faire make necessary improvements fast.

We always want to make sure our customers are satisfied with the feature. And if the sentiment is neutral or negative, we use that as an opportunity to explore what changes we can make to improve their experience.

Q: Are you working towards any specific KPIs or metrics? Are there particular things you're looking to improve?

Erin: Yes, one of the key metrics is customer satisfaction. Right now, I’m working on two specific product areas: improving financial tools for our brands and retailers, and optimizing the shipping experience.

For the financial tools, we’re gradually rolling out a feature to help retailers have an easier time making payments on Faire. One of the things I’m tracking is how many people actually opt to use this new feature, compared to those who choose to stick with our traditional payment method, like using a credit card. So adoption rate is definitely one of the key metrics.

For the shipping experience, I’m looking at things like how customers feel about shipping costs, how long delivery takes, and similar factors. So overall, it’s really about customer experience and sentiment.

Another important metric I’m always monitoring is contact rate—how often customers reach out to our support team. A lower contact rate usually indicates a smoother experience, so it’s a valuable indicator of how well the product is meeting their needs.

Using Chattermill & customer insights

Q: Tell me a little bit more—what’s your day-to-day work with Chattermill? What do you usually do when you log in on a Monday morning?

Erin: Recently, I noticed that you’ve added a newhemes section. If people don’t have it yet, they should definitely look forward to using it! I actually check it almost every time I log in now, because many of the teams I work with manage multiple areas of ownership.

I often need to look at both the smaller, specific areas and the bigger picture—and the Themes section lets me do that really easily. I can pick an umbrella topic and then dig into the subtopics. It also includes sentiment and volume over time, which are the two main reports I tend to pull right away when I start working in Chattermill.

It’s super helpful to have those insights right there without having to build anything myself—you’ve already done that work for me. And those umbrella topics are personalized to Faire, which I imagine is the case for other companies using Chattermill too.

So for me, it’s incredibly useful to quickly check in on areas like the shipping experience or financial tools.

Q: Can you walk us through an example of a report or dashboard you regularly check?

‍Erin: Sure! I check average volume all the time—that’s one of the key metrics I look at. I report it to my managers to make sure our volume of ticket requests hasn’t suddenly spiked, which could indicate a lot of customers are experiencing the same issue.

It’s one of the first things I look at for every topic. When I notice an increase, it makes me curious to dig deeper and figure out what might have changed for our customers and why they’re reaching out more. From there, I’ll dive into the actual feedback and look for any common themes that are coming up.

On the flip side, if the volume goes down, that’s often a great opportunity to celebrate a feature or give a shoutout to the team for a change they made that’s helped reduce contact rates.

So depending on what I find in that average volume report, it usually sets off a bit of a chain reaction that guides where I go next.

Q: Are you mostly focused on negative feedback—what’s not working—or do you also look at positive feedback from customers?

Erin: I think both are really important. Negative feedback helps us spot where customers might be struggling—whether they’re confused by something or there’s a clear pain point we could improve. 

But positive feedback is just as valuable. It shows us what’s working well and what customers appreciate. For example, if we get great feedback about the ordering process, we can look at what made that experience successful and maybe apply some of those learnings to areas like shipping. So I definitely try to look at both. And honestly, it’s also a great way to celebrate wins with the team.

Q: That makes sense. And when it comes to negative feedback—how do you prioritize what to fix first?

Erin: That’s a great question. When I’m sharing feedback with my team or manager, I like to look at a few things:

• How many people are being impacted?

• How it’s impacting them?
  

• Why it’s happening?

• And what resources we’re currently using to try and resolve the issue?
  

For example, I look at contact rates to gauge how widespread the issue is. Then I’ll review the direct feedback or support tickets in Chattermill to understand how it’s affecting customers—like, is it a confusing UI issue, or is it something that’s actually hurting their margins or preventing them from using a key feature?

I also look at the internal resources we're using—average handle time and how many cases we’re escalating to Engineering. If we’re escalating a lot, I’ll ask whether there’s an enablement opportunity to help the Support Team solve more of those issues on their own.

It’s a lot of information to pull together, but it helps me give a more complete picture when sharing feedback with people who are making roadmap decisions.

Q: Speaking of escalating and sharing—what happens next? How do you make sure the right teams actually get the information and act on it?

Erin: That really depends on the product stage and who I’m collaborating with. Sometimes, I’ll share feedback live in meetings—we usually have regular syncs with Product Managers and other Team Leads, which gives us space to talk through feedback. If I’ve built a dashboard, I’ll walk through the key reports and what they show, and I love that I can just share the link so others can dig in deeper if they want to.

For new features, especially right after launch, I typically run biweekly reviews focused on all the feedback tied to that feature. I’ll group the feedback by theme, look for any root causes, and then share a summary—either in the relevant Slack channel or during one of those meetings.

In some cases, especially when we see people opting out of a feature, it’s actually more helpful to look at individual feedback rather than themes. That kind of granular insight helps us understand exactly why someone might not be engaging with a feature.

And when we’re still in the pre-launch phase, I usually run weekly reviews of general feedback to spot anything that could influence the direction before we go live.

I like to combine both qualitative and quantitative data when I share insights. And then finally—something I really love using is workflows. It’s such an easy, passive way to share feedback. Other people at Faire can review the feedback as it comes into the Slack channel, whenever it’s convenient for them.

It makes things a lot easier for teams or individuals who might not have direct access to Chattermill but still want to stay close to what customers are saying. I’ve found it’s a great way to make sure more people get eyes on the feedback regularly.

Q: Can you tell us about how you were handling customer feedback before using Chattermill?

Erin: Before using Chattermill, Faire had several areas where we collected feedback—support tickets, surveys, and feedback from our sales team, who input their comments into Salesforce. The challenge was that I didn’t always have access to all that feedback, whereas Chattermill aggregates it into one place.

One of the main advantages of using AI is the time it saves. I don’t have to search through different tools for feedback; it’s all in one place. We also receive a variety of feedback, including many support requests, and organizing and reading through it all can be very time-consuming. Chattermill helps by summarizing and categorizing the feedback into similar topics, which makes it much easier to review and get the big picture.

So, as I mentioned, it saves me a lot of time. I can quickly respond to feedback when I see it. This means we’re not lagging in our responses. If something significant comes up, we can act on it within a few weeks, especially if it's a major pain point for customers.

Measuring impact 

Q:  Erin, I wanted to ask about some real-life examples. Could you share a few insights you found in Chattermill that really made a difference?

Erin: One example that really stuck out was last year when I was working on a team developing a feature that would allow retailers to be the sole stockist of a brand's product in their local area. During this gradual rollout stage, not everyone had access to the feature, and we were closely monitoring the feedback. I was providing weekly updates on what we were hearing.

Using Chattermill, I was able to easily pull feedback from multiple sources. One of the early pieces of feedback we received was that people wanted to be able to customize these arrangements. When we initially launched the feature, it set the same agreement for all retailers—same annual spend, same protected location area. But the feedback we got showed that retailers have unique relationships with other stores and wanted the ability to customize their agreements.

So, while I eventually moved on to other projects, I'm happy to share that just a year later, in January, the team launched custom agreements for brands and retailers. Now, they can set unique agreements based on their needs. The feedback really helped us understand what areas needed customization—like the spend amount and the size of the protected area. Since the launch, more brands and retailers have been setting up these custom agreements each week, which is great to see. Chattermill helped us identify that feedback, and even after I left the team, they continued to gather customer input and work on refining the feature to meet their needs.

Becoming a CX Leader

Q: What’s your superpower as a CX Leader?

Erin: I would say my curiosity, 

Q: What’s the first thing you check in Chattermill each Monday?

Erin: Lately, I really love the themes section. Before that, we had Copilot, where you could ask a question, and it would prompt the answer. Those are definitely two features I check first.

Q: Which feedback channels matter most to your team?

Erin: I think all of our channels matter. I wouldn’t necessarily rate one above the other, but we do receive a lot of support tickets, so generally, that’s the one with the most feedback.

Q: What would you say is the most underrated feedback source?

Erin: I would say internal feedback. It’s super insightful and important. If you don’t already have an internal feedback tool, you can use Slack with a workflow that sends it to Chattermill to gather insights from people who are directly talking to your customers each day.

Q: What’s one CX metric you’re obsessed with?

Erin: I think I’ve talked about it a few times—contact rate is definitely one that I use a lot.

Q: What’s the biggest CX myth you wish would disappear?

Erin: We definitely focus on speed, and I’ve mentioned how AI can help us support customers faster. But one of the biggest myths is that support needs to be really fast. In reality, it also needs to be accurate, empathetic, and personalized. It's about finding a happy medium between resolution time and those other factors.

Q: What’s the most unexpected insight from customer feedback that you’ve found?

Erin: For me, it’s when customers use the product in a way that we hadn’t intended. They’re trying to make it do something we didn’t foresee, and that often sparks an idea. Maybe we need a feature for what they’re trying to do.

Q: What’s the best compliment a customer has given your team?

Erin: I always love when customers tell us how much they trust us. It’s such a big confidence boost and shows how important we are to their business and relationship with us. When they say we help them be successful, that’s the best compliment.

Q: What’s your favorite Chattermill feature and why?

Erin: I really love the themes section. And, as I mentioned earlier, I also love the workflows. I think it’s great that you can connect Slack and Chattermill together to pull feedback into multiple places.

Q: What’s one thing CX teams should stop doing immediately?

Erin: This ties into my earlier response—feedback should be personalized. We shouldn’t assume that the customer hasn’t already tried to resolve the issue on their own. CX can see what the customer has been doing, and we need to take that into account in our responses. For example, we shouldn’t ask, “Did you try turning it off and on?” if they’ve already attempted that.

Q: What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

Erin: I love hearing that a feature has made a difference for a customer, whether it’s made their life easier or helped them get more sales. Knowing that we’ve had an impact is really rewarding.

Q: What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Erin: The best advice I’ve received is to not be afraid to share your ideas. It can be intimidating, but don’t hesitate to share ideas that might make things more customer-centric or solve a customer problem.

Q: If your CX team had a tagline, what would it be?

Erin: My team, the Customer Advocates at Faire, I’d say we’re the extreme team.

Q: Why extreme?

Erin: We’re really great—no tooting our own horn—but we’re fantastic collaborative partners. We take on a lot of different projects, and we’re passionate advocates for our customers. Sometimes we can be extreme about being advocates, especially when something isn’t working.

Q: Thank you so much, Erin. It was an absolute pleasure. 

Erin: Thank you for having me! This was great!