How Marktplaats Turns Customer Feedback into UX and Product Decisions

Results

• A platform with 8M+ monthly visitors, now with one view of customer feedback
• ~144,000 comments analyzed every year
• 5 data sources combined into a single source of truth
• Customer sentiment is now a monthly KPI reported to leadership
• ~25% less negative feedback on image uploads after UX fixes

Inside Marktplaats’ customer-centricity strategy

Marktplaats is the Netherlands’ largest online marketplace, connecting millions of buyers and sellers across categories ranging from furniture and electronics to cars and fashion. 

With more than 8 million unique visitors a month and around 350,000 new listings every day, delivering a seamless user experience at every step, from creating a listing to closing a deal, is central to the platform’s success.

We spoke with Gertjan Melgers, Research Manager & Lead UX Researcher at Marktplaats, about how the team brought customer feedback together, created a shared view of the customer experience, and began embedding customer insight into business and product decisions.

Q: Tell me more about your role, your team, and your responsibilities, particularly how customer experience fits into your day-to-day work.

Gertjan: I lead UX research at Marktplaats as Research Manager, with a team of three researchers. My role is to help the organization understand our customers and turn that understanding into better product decisions. 

A big part of that is becoming more customer-centric. We want to make sure customer understanding doesn’t just live within the research team, but is visible and usable at every level of the organization, from the teams building the product to leadership.

Q: Which channels and feedback sources do you analyze through Chattermill?

Gertjan: We bring together customer feedback from our Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, NPS, app reviews, and surveys. Altogether, that’s around 12,000 open comments a month, or roughly 144,000 a year.

For me, the most valuable part is the open-text feedback. The scores are useful, but what people write in their own words is what helps us understand what customers are actually experiencing.

We’ve also just kicked off a new project to add customer support chat data to the mix. That will bring in more comments a month and give us an even richer view of the customer experience.

Q: What are your north star metrics when it comes to user experience?

Gertjan: We don’t really have one single north star metric. We track a lot of metrics across the organization. What has changed is that customer sentiment is now a health metric we report to leadership every month, alongside our financials. It shows us where the gaps in our user experience are, so we can help teams focus on closing them. 

We still track Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) separately, and each one is useful on its own. But the advantage now is that we look at customer sentiment as a single metric and then drill down into the different channels.

Chattermill brings the open-text feedback behind those scores together in one consistent view. It helps us understand not just that a score went from 10 to 20, but why customers feel the way they do and what’s driving it.

Q: What questions do you try to answer through customer feedback?

Gertjan: One is what customers are saying when we launch a new feature or product, and whether that shows up in sentiment.

We also look at customer pains and gains. How much volume is there behind a topic? Which teams’ areas are improving or declining? Are there new issues, or issues that are growing this month? And which customer groups are most affected?

Right now, we still need to get better at digging into very specific segments, so for the moment it’s more of a high-level view of the overall experience.

Before Chattermill

Q: How were you collecting and making sense of your feedback across different channels and teams before Chattermill?

Gertjan: We did share customer feedback with teams before, but each source had its own route. CES and CSAT were analyzed in separate reports, customer relations had their own view, and some people followed app reviews themselves. 

We had some manual classification in place, but it was time-consuming and hard to keep consistent. Chattermill helped us bring the different sources together and made the feedback more visible across the organization.

Q: What business conditions triggered your decision to look for a solution like Chattermill? What were your biggest pain points?

Gertjan: Our feedback was fragmented across channels, tools, and teams, and the question was really: how do I combine all of this?

There was no single, shared picture of what customers were telling us. One team would take a report and say, “This is the truth,” while someone else had a different view of what the evidence showed. A big part of what we needed was to make feedback centrally available. It was about breaking down those silos.

It was also hard to quantify patterns, because the data wasn’t all in one place, so you had to do it manually. Before Chattermill, consistently comparing teams, customer groups, and time periods was all manual work.

Bringing the voice of the customer into leadership

Q: How did Chattermill change the way you brought the customer perspective into conversations with leadership?

Gertjan: Chattermill helped us build momentum around a shared understanding of the customer experience.

Before, a lot of what customers told us never surfaced in the organization because it stayed locked in separate tools. Making that feedback visible was a big part of the change.

We decided to use customer sentiment as a single, unified metric for the customer experience. Now we can see whether something is improving or declining, which part of the journey it affects, and then dig into what real users are actually saying behind it.

Everyone has access to the platform, which gives teams more autonomy to explore the feedback themselves. Management can do the same, and a couple of people on the management team actively use Chattermill on their own.

That gives us a common starting point for discussing priorities.

Q: What did having that evidence-based view enable you to do differently once you were in those conversations?

Gertjan: Chattermill lets us move from anecdotes to evidence. Instead of saying, “I heard a customer say X,” we can say, “Chattermill shows 50 comments on this topic this month.”

We can explain how often something comes up, what customers are actually experiencing, and why it matters. That makes it much easier to bring the customer perspective into decisions.

Identifying the biggest priorities

Q: How has Chattermill helped you identify the biggest opportunities to improve?

Gertjan: This year there was a push across the organization to become more customer-centric and to understand which customer problems matter most.

Many of those problems had been known for a while. Chattermill helped us pin down our top five customer pains and gains and made sure everyone was looking at the same list. Having the volume behind each topic helped us make the case for prioritizing them.

That’s also where it’s most useful for me: it shows which issues are growing, which are fading, and where the experience is working well, so we can act on what matters most.

Q: What has AI-powered customer feedback analysis shown you that traditional metrics couldn’t?

Gertjan: One thing that was really nice to discover after introducing Chattermill was how sensitive it is as a customer indicator.

For example, when we had a performance issue or a product bug, we’d often see a big spike in Chattermill. Once the issue was fixed, it would drop back down.

That really strengthened the case that we can trust the incoming feedback, because it closely matched what was actually happening on the platform.

Traditional NPS is still valuable, but it’s more of a lagging indicator. Having always-on analysis that picks up these changes as they happen has really added to the value of the tool.

The impact on Gertjan’s role

Q: Has the way you’ve brought customer insight into the business changed the scope or visibility of your role?

Gertjan: Yes, my responsibilities have definitely grown.

I’ve been a Research Manager for about a year now, and the role has broadened my scope. I’m no longer focused only on individual research projects. I’m also responsible for giving the organization regular insight into customer sentiment.

That includes monthly reporting to leadership and making sure the customer perspective has a regular place in those conversations.

Q: How has Chattermill helped you turn customer insight into action, uncover opportunities for growth, and influence what the business does next?

Gertjan: Customer feedback is much more visible now and comes up in discussions all the time, but we still need to make acting on it more systematic. Some teams are already using it really well.

Image uploads are a good example. Customers told us photos were appearing rotated and uploading was a pain, so teams fixed the rotation issue and made further upload fixes. Afterwards the share of negative feedback on that topic dropped by about a quarter.

Not every priority gets this treatment yet. The next step is to look at our top five customer priorities and ask, “What action are we going to take on each of these?” That’s still a work in progress.

Q: Was there a particular moment when you realized your role had shifted from reporting on customer feedback to actively influencing business decisions?

Gertjan: I wouldn’t point to one moment. It was more gradual. Customer sentiment became a fixed part of the monthly leadership conversation, and over time the question changed from “what does the data say?” to “what are we going to do about it?”

The broader ambition is to embed customer understanding within the teams that make the decisions. It shouldn’t be something owned only by the research team. My role is to make sure the evidence is there, trusted, and easy to use.

Connecting feedback to product changes

Q: How has customer sentiment changed over the past year?

Gertjan: We started using Chattermill about a year ago, with the goal of establishing a consistent way to understand and report on customer sentiment. Since then, sentiment has improved in several areas.

Image uploads are a good example. They had been a major source of frustration, and sentiment on that topic has improved since teams shipped fixes. 

It’s great to see feedback connect directly to product changes. When we ship UX fixes, we can see the impact reflected in Chattermill.

Q: What action did you take based on those insights? Was there anything else?

Gertjan: Another example is our new AI-assisted listing flow for creating ads on the platform. That was one of the company’s bigger initiatives this year, driven by our product strategy rather than by customer feedback, which is natural for something this new.

But once we launched the feature and started monitoring feedback, Chattermill gave us a clear view of how customers were responding. That really helped us celebrate the success with the teams involved. It’s another good example of bringing customer feedback back to the teams who built the feature.

Q: What are the biggest benefits of using our platform?

Gertjan: The biggest benefit is having one consistent view of customer feedback. Every team can access customer feedback that’s been processed in the same way, organized around our team structure, and available through the MCP as well.

It’s been a real step forward in our journey toward becoming a more customer-centric organization. It makes customer feedback visible and accessible across the business, gives us a consistent way to discuss it, and helps bring the customer perspective into our regular decision-making.

Looking ahead

Q: Looking back on your first year with Chattermill, what’s your main takeaway, and what comes next?

Gertjan: My main takeaway is that a year in, we have a shared view of the customer that everyone can use, and you can see sentiment rising in several areas of the experience. It has helped sharpen our focus on the customer and prioritize issues like image uploads.

What comes next is twofold. We’re bringing in our customer support data, which will give teams an even fuller picture. And we want to make acting on feedback a more regular habit, so each of our top customer priorities has a clear owner and next step.

See how Chattermill can help your organization turn customer feedback into clearer priorities and better decisions —  book a demo.

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