Challenge

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 great experience at every step, from creating a listing to closing a deal, is central to the platform’s success.

Customer understanding is what makes that possible. Marktplaats’s UX Research team, led by Gertjan Melgers, Research Manager, helps the organization understand its customers and turn those insights into better product decisions. As the company set out to become more customer-centric, the goal was to make that understanding visible and usable across the whole business.

The obstacle was never a lack of feedback, but how scattered it was. “Our feedback was fragmented across channels, tools, and teams,” Gertjan explains. 

“We analyzed CES and CSAT in separate reports, customer relations had their own view, and people were looking at app reviews on their own. The question was really: how do I combine all of this?”

That fragmentation meant there was no shared picture of what customers were saying. 

“One team would take a report and say, ‘This is the truth,’ while someone else had a different view of what the evidence showed.”

Marktplaats needed to bring every source together into one consistent view: analyzed the same way, trusted by every team, and accessible to anyone making decisions about the customer experience. “A big part of what we needed was to make feedback centrally available,” Gertjan says. “It was about breaking down those silos.”

Solution

Marktplaats introduced Chattermill to unify customer feedback from different sources and make it accessible across the entire organization. A year later, it underpins how teams understand customers and make decisions.

The first step was creating a single source of truth. Comments from CES, CSAT, NPS, app reviews, and surveys, around 144,000 a year, are now analyzed consistently in one place. 

Alongside its existing CES, CSAT, and NPS scores, Marktplaats now tracks customer sentiment as one unified metric. It has become a health metric reported to leadership every month, alongside the company’s financials. It shows where the gaps in the user experience are, so teams can focus on closing them. “Chattermill helped us build a shared understanding of the customer experience,” says Gertjan.

With everyone working from the same data, conversations about customer experience have become more grounded. Teams no longer rely on anecdotes or isolated reports to make decisions. 

“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.”

One early sign that the feedback could be relied on: because Chattermill analyzes feedback continuously, changes on the platform show up quickly.

When a performance issue or product bug occurred, it appeared as a spike in Chattermill, then dropped once it was fixed. “That really strengthened the case that we can trust the incoming feedback,” Gertjan says. 

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

That same real-time view now helps teams understand the impact of their work. Whether they’re fixing long-standing pain points or launching something new, they can see how customers respond. “Once we launched a new feature and started monitoring feedback post-launch, Chattermill gave us a clear view of how customers were responding,” says Gertjan.

Together, these changes have turned scattered customer feedback into a shared, trusted resource that informs decisions across Marktplaats.

Results

A year after introducing Chattermill, customer sentiment is improving in several areas of the consumer goods experience.

Image uploads, a long-standing source of frustration, are a clear example: after teams fixed the photo rotation issue and made further improvements to uploads, the share of negative feedback on that topic dropped by about a quarter.

Beyond the numbers, the biggest change is how the organization works with feedback.

 “The biggest benefit of Chattermill is having one consistent view of customer feedback. The AI analyzes everything in the same way, so everybody works from the same results. Every team can access that feedback, organized around our theme structure, and it’s available through the MCP as well."

"Being able to build dashboards is great, of course, but Chattermill is much more than a feedback analysis platform. It’s been a real step forward in our journey toward becoming a more customer-centric organization,” Gertjan says.

Customer sentiment is now a health metric reported to leadership every month, alongside the company’s financials, which gives customer insight a regular place in those conversations. “My role is to make sure the evidence is there, trusted, and easy to use,” Gertjan says.

Acting on feedback is still a work in progress. The next step is to make it a more regular habit, so each of the top customer priorities has a clear owner and next step. Marktplaats is also bringing customer support data into Chattermill, which will give teams an even fuller picture.

For Marktplaats, customer understanding no longer sits with the research team alone. It’s becoming part of how the whole business decides what to do next.

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

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