Key takeaways
- Salma Lahbiss is a Consumer Insights Analyst at a large French marketplace platform for buying, selling, and exchanging goods and services.
- Salma stressed that distributing customer insights across channels like Slack, newsletters, and meetings, while sharing direct customer feedback, is essential for translating data into action and driving meaningful change.
- She highlighted a key strategy for gaining leadership buy-in: linking customer feedback to business outcomes. “I look at the volume of feedback related to each friction point and assess the impact on our company’s priorities,” she explained, showing leadership how addressing these issues can drive meaningful change.
- Salma highlighted that AI transforms CX by saving time, uncovering nuanced details from customer feedback, and quantifying qualitative data, enabling teams to track changes and measure impact.
Understanding customer needs
Q: Tell me about yourself, your role at the company, and your main objectives. Working at a marketplace must be particularly complex when it comes to customer feedback. You’re likely receiving feedback from both sellers and buyers, which adds another layer to the strategy.
Salma: What you said about the complexity is absolutely right—we receive feedback from both sellers and buyers.
My role focuses on deeply understanding our users’ needs—whether they’re sellers or buyers—and identifying their pain points through user research and experience measurement.
It goes beyond customer experience. I need to ensure that the insights we gather actively shape decision-making and are taken into account by the teams.
Right now, I have two main priorities. The first is turning feedback into action by talking more about the insights and actively sharing them with the teams. The second is aligning teams around customer-centric decisions—whether that’s the product team, customer team, or others. It’s important that all teams have access to customer feedback.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about the specific areas you're currently looking to improve or understand through customer feedback?
Salma: Feedback is truly valuable when it contributes to solving a problem. I’m currently focused on identifying friction points in the customer journey and gaining a deeper understanding of key metrics.
While NPS, satisfaction, and CSAT are useful metrics, the real insight comes from understanding the reasons behind users' scores.
In some cases, feedback doesn’t just highlight areas that need fixing; it offers opportunities to enhance the overall experience. This type of feedback is invaluable for proactively driving product improvements.
Q: I’m really glad you said that. We often focus on metrics like NPS, but it’s just as important to understand why that NPS or score is what it is. That’s often a challenge for many in the industry.
Using Chattermill to prioritize customer pain points
Q: Can you tell me how it fits into your daily workflow? What’s your usual first step when you log in on Monday or first thing in the morning?
Chattermill is my go-to tool for analyzing qualitative feedback. When I do log in, my main goal is to identify emerging trends and see what has changed since my last visit.
Salma: I typically start by reviewing the themes and tracking the evolution of net sentiment within each theme. If something has changed, I try to understand why. My usual approach is to go directly to the specific dashboards I’ve set up to make the process more efficient and save time.
Q: Can you walk us through an example of a dashboard or report you use and monitor on a daily basis?
Salma: As you know, we have a specific theme structure in Chattermill. One of the dashboards I use frequently is what I would call a generalist dashboard, which provides an overview of all the themes we track.
This dashboard allows me to track the evolution of net sentiment and compare it to previous months. In addition to these high-level reports, I have access to more granular reports within the same dashboard.
Sometimes, while the themes may appear stable at a high level, a deeper look reveals significant changes. This level of detail helps me understand the underlying shifts..
Q: Are you the one who builds these dashboards and then shares them with the rest of the team? How does that process work?
Salma: When we first started, I took the initiative to create some dashboards, but as we’re a large company with diverse needs, we decided to involve the teams in the dashboard creation process.
This approach has been really effective because when teams take ownership of a dashboard, they tend to consult it more regularly and use the data more effectively.
I’m not the only one in the company using Chattermill—many of my colleagues use it as well. While they may not create dashboards themselves, they often use the platform to generate reports or consult feedback on specific topics.
Q: You mentioned earlier that one of your core objectives is understanding the pain points and friction points in the customer journey. Once you identify them, how do you prioritize these key customer pain points that your team should tackle next?
Salma: Prioritization is a crucial step because, at times, you might identify numerous friction points, and taking action without prioritization can quickly become overwhelming. For prioritization, I rely on one of Chattermill’s features—Impact Analysis.
Impact Analysis helps me identify the specific themes that have the greatest impact on net sentiment, whether positive or negative. It also allows us to classify the impact of these themes by attributing a weight to each one.
In addition to this, I look at the volume of feedback related to each friction point and assess the potential impact of addressing these issues on our company’s priorities. For example, would solving this friction point help us achieve our goals more effectively? Does it have a significant negative impact on customer satisfaction?
Another factor in prioritization is feasibility—how easy is it to take action on this specific friction point? We combine these three factors—impact, volume, and feasibility—to identify and tackle the most impactful friction points.
Sharing insights to drive informed decision-making
Q: How do you share these insights with the rest of the company or teams, ensuring alignment before action is taken?
Salma: Taking action is definitely the key, but communicating insights effectively across teams is equally important. We combine the metrics and the story behind the insights to ensure that they understand the impact.
I regularly update the dashboards and communicate through our internal channels to notify teams when new data is available. In addition, we create summary slides—typically a three-slide overview—highlighting what’s changed this month compared to the previous month, along with some actionable recommendations. This helps make the insights more accessible and relevant to the internal users of the reports.
Q: Are you sharing these slides and recommendations during company-wide meetings, or do you join specific team meetings to share them? How does that process work?
Sharing insights is one of the most important steps in making them actionable, so we distribute them across different channels. First, we have Slack channels dedicated to research and insights where we share updates regularly.
Another method is to include these insights in our company newsletter. I also present them in our biweekly meetings with my team and in meetings with management.
Another way we make the insights more impactful is by sharing direct verbatim feedback from users. This allows the teams to relate more closely to the customers' pain points, helping to foster a deeper understanding and encourage action.
Leveraging AI to drive actionable insights
Q: When it comes to analyzing customer feedback, I imagine you receive a large volume of insights. What would you say is the biggest advantage of using AI to analyze that feedback?
Salma: The first and most significant benefit of using AI for analyzing customer feedback is saving time. Analyzing feedback isn’t as straightforward as working with metrics. You have to read each piece of feedback individually. AI helps us process large volumes of feedback much more efficiently.
The second advantage is the depth that AI offers in understanding user sentiment. It’s capable of detecting nuances in the feedback, which is one of its great strengths.
The real power of specialized tools is their ability to quantify qualitative data. This makes it easier to track changes over time and adds a level of reliability to the insights. You can also see the volume of feedback for specific issues or pain points and dive deeper into the data.
Additionally, with AI tools, we can compare the impact of each theme from month to month and see how things evolve. This is something we wouldn't be able to do manually or with basic AI tools.
Q: That’s a great point. Could you share an insight you discovered in Chattermill that really made a difference in your decision-making or strategy?
Salma: Sure! We identified an insight through Chattermill that significantly impacted our strategy. By comparing data month-to-month, we observed the impact of each theme. One key area of our product, when improved, would help resolve four main friction points that had been recurring every month.
Addressing this area would have a significant impact and help improve the user experience across several funnels. This insight was crucial in helping us prioritize and focus our efforts on the areas that would drive the most impact.
Q: Can you share how you addressed this issue?
Salma: To identify this as a real issue, I looked at the frequency and recurrence of the problem over several months. I also analyzed its impact on other key pain points, which was highlighted in the Impact Analysis. Once we understood the broader impact, we included this in our recommendations.
I recognized that solving this wouldn't be immediate, so we communicated the issue to the management team. It's now part of our prioritized topics to address.
Getting stakeholder buy-in
Q: How do you generally report on customer feedback to your leadership team? Are there specific KPIs or metrics they focus on?
Salma: One of the most important metrics we track is the Customer Effort Score, which we follow closely and report regularly to the leadership team. This score is crucial for them, as it directly relates to the customer experience.
In addition to that, we also focus on the themes with the highest impact, which is where the Impact Analysis becomes especially useful. It helps me communicate how these themes evolve each month, providing a clear view of their overall impact.
Q: We've got a large community of CX leaders and managers, and I'm sure they’d love to hear some best practices from you. What's one thing you wish more CX Managers understood about using customer feedback in general?
One thing I wish more CX Managers knew is that the time and effort required to communicate insights to the teams should not be underestimated. It’s not just about gathering feedback and analyzing it; a significant portion of the work goes into showing the importance of that feedback and ensuring the teams understand it.
It can be easy to assume the job is done once the analysis is complete, but in reality, this is the challenging part, and I continuously learn it.
Q: Great point! What advice would you give to CX managers who are just starting out with Chattermill?
Salma: First, create a clear adoption plan. Getting teams to regularly use the tool and see its value takes effort. Having a structured plan in place for how to roll out and adopt the tool is crucial for success.
Secondly, put yourself in the user’s shoes. When you’re looking for specific feedback, don’t just search for the usual terms or phrases. Think about how the customer would express their feedback or frustration. Consider the language they might use, or if there’s an implicit way they might communicate their feelings.
This mindset helps you uncover valuable insights that may otherwise be overlooked, especially if you’re only searching for the common or internal terminology. By adopting this perspective, you'll capture a wider range of relevant feedback.
Q: Are there any trends in CX that you’re closely monitoring or think will become big?
Salma: I’m particularly interested in the use of AI in user research. I’m really curious to see what new tools, trends, and use cases emerge in this area. AI has the potential to make our work much easier by helping us focus on the most important tasks, so I’m excited to see how it evolves and how we can leverage it to enhance the customer experience.
Becoming a CX Leader
Q: What’s your secret superpower as a CX leader?
Salma: Making data feel human.
Q: What’s the first thing you check in Chattermill each Monday?
Salma: The trends and data evolution.
Q: Which feedback channels matter most to your team?
Salma: For me, the feedback from SurveyMonkey (the surveys I create) matters the most.
Q: One CX metric you're obsessed with?
Salma: The Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score.
Q: Biggest CX myth you wish would disappear?
Salma: That NPS tells you everything, because it doesn’t.
Q: What’s your go-to way to get buy-in from leadership?
Salma: Showing the impact of insights at a business level.
Q: What’s the most unexpected insight from customer feedback?
Salma: Sometimes, when people are angry, they write things that are actually pretty funny.
Q: What was the best compliment a customer has given to your team?
Salma: It’s when customers reach out to tell us that they compared the platform years ago and now, and say, “Wow, you’ve really improved.”
Q: What’s your favorite Chattermill feature and why?
Salma: I’d say tagging in the workflow. It helps me save time from doing the same searches every time, and it makes it easier to track things I’m interested in.
Q: What’s the most rewarding part of your job?
Salma: Seeing that customers notice the changes we’ve made to the product. It feels really good when people appreciate what we do.
Q: What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Salma: It’s good to take feedback from people—it helps you improve. Some people are really trying to help, so just listen to the feedback and take what makes sense to you.
Q: If your CX team had a tagline, what would it be?
Salma: I’m part of a great user experience team, and I would say the tagline would be:
“If it seems effortless, then we’re doing our job right.”
Q: I love that. Salma,thank you so much for joining us today. It sounds like you and your team are doing an amazing job for your customers. Once again, thank you for joining us, and I hope to hear from you soon!
Salma: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for this great initiative of gathering feedback from customer success managers and user researchers. I really appreciate this opportunity.
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