How Apollo.io grew 9x by mapping customer feedback to revenue

Tiffany Go

Head of Product Marketing

November 21, 2023

We recently sat with Abishek Viswanathan, Chief Product Officer at one of the most successful PLG companies, Apollo.io, for an insightful conversation. During our chat he shared how Apollo.io accelerates its product growth by mapping customer feedback to revenue impact and how their Voice of Customer program that has helped reduce support requests by over 40%.

Read on to get the recap or watch a replay of our conversation ➡️ Roundtable: Connect Customer Feedback to Revenue Impact.

Understanding the Voice of Customer - make it a science

"In Product Led Growth, you cannot hide value. You have to prove value to the customer every step of the way," Abishek emphasized. "We have the analytics to understand where people are dropping off in the product usage funnel, but we needed to move from where to why," Abishek shared. This commitment to understanding the 'why' led Abishek and his team to establish the VoC initiative at Apollo.io.

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"Unfortunately for most teams, it has become an art when it should be a science," says Abishek. "It's understandable - product teams want to develop the Voice of Customer. Getting to that ideal state means talking to 1000s of customers and synthesizing all that information - which often is impossible and feels overwhelming."

To tackle this challenge of managing feedback at scale, Abishek and the team used Enterpret to consolidate all feedback so the organization can understand and align around the Voice of Customer.

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Root Cause Elimination - the evolution of VoC

Apollo.io's VoC strategy involves Root Cause Elimination (RCE). RCE uses customer insights to identify the main reasons behind customer churn or friction, quantifying them by revenue impact and then systematically addressing these issues. "With RCE, we understand the actual outcome of when our team goes to fix some of these issues and whether our investments and fixes are reducing friction."

Abishek shared the RCE framework used at Apollo.io:

Combine all customer feedback and data to develop a holistic data-driven understanding of VoC
Surface themes in an automated way
Prioritize themes by revenue to determine what needs to be eliminated or automated
Take action and measure the outcome

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Finding the Pareto by mapping feedback to revenue

Abishek believes automation, events, and metrics should solve usability issues and bugs. " If users are contacting support about either, it means you're not just wasting an associate's time but also frustrating the customer."

Abishek and his team looked at the distribution of issues and found:

40% root cause fixes (mostly bugs, UX, and usability issues)
40% usability issue or education (empower users to self-serve)
20% organic to the business (human contact necessary)

With this understanding, the team used VoC insights across surveys, support chats, cancellation surveys, and customer interviews, bucketing these and prioritizing by ARR. What they were able to do was identify the Pareto* in the first two buckets of issues. (*Pareto is identifying 20% of the issues that cause 80% of the damage or 80% of the inbound contacts.)

"There is a long tail of things that you could continuously keep trying to improve, but it won't improve metrics as much. There is an opportunity cost there. You can use engineering to build a new feature rather than solve that one issue that will automatically get sorted out in the roadmap." The ultimate goal is to free up teams to focus on the highest-impact investments, says Abishek.

Using Enterpret, Apollo.io consolidates all their different sources into categories and associates them with the customer segments by buyers, titles, and locations. Once the data is consolidated, Enterpret helps to enrich and surface much better data so the team can take action to tackle these problems segment by segment.

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Apollo.io reduces human inquiry rate by over 40% using VoC

"Since launching our Voice of Customer program six months ago, our team has dropped our human inquiry rate by over 40%, improved customer satisfaction, and enabled our team to allocate resources to building features that increase LTV and revenue."

For Abishek, "The big win-win is our VoC program enabled us to leverage our engineering resources to ship significantly awesome and valuable features while minimizing bug fixes and" keep the lights on" work. Magnifying and focusing on the 20% that causes the impact is like finding the needle in a haystack, especially when you have issues coming from all over the place." says Abishek.

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Evolving VoC and RCE to drive PLG

That's many acronyms, but for Apollo, this is a multi-phase strategic journey to enhance user experience and product value at every phase of the PLG journey. This phased approach, emphasizing root cause elimination and continuous improvement, ensures that current users derive maximum value from the product, new users are effectively onboarded, and long-term value is delivered for all.

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Advice for product teams looking to establish Voice of Customer

For other product organizations looking to spin up a VoC program, Abishek stressed the importance of tying the program to specific business outcomes. "Set up a VoC program that is targeted towards a core problem your business is facing; do not set up a VoC program just for the sake of it," he advised.

Abishek reflected on what he would do differently with the VoC program rollout. "In hindsight, I wish we had rolled it out to the entire organization from day one. We piloted with a few teams with the highest Human Interaction Rates (HIR). We saw a significant improvement in self-service pretty soon after rolling out VoC+ RCE initiatives. Having one central VoC/RCE program with the tools set up and the insights flowing in means that all teams had access to the four issues they needed to concentrate on to drop their HIR. Enterpret centralized VoC and saved time on the cross-organization coordination."

If you want more advice on establishing a Voice of Customer program at a PLG company, we did a full Q&A in this blog post with some very actionable advice from Abishek.

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VoC is critical for any customer-led company

Our discussion with Abishek highlights the power of a customer-centric approach in driving revenue and delivering value to customers. By aggregating all customer feedback and directly integrating that volume with revenue, the Apollo.io team will continue to make informed bets that compound on themselves over time.

If you'd like to connect customer feedback to revenue impact, please don't hesitate to get in touch with the Enterpret team for a chat. Or follow us on LinkedIn or X for more VoC insights and to be notified of our future events!

We are laser-focused on giving customers more than they expect through a hospitality-first, individualized approach to drive retention and loyalty. Enterpret has allowed us to stitch together a full picture of the customer, including feedback and reviews from multiple data points. We now can super-serve our loyal customers in a way that we have never been able to before.

Anna Esrov

Vice President of Customer Experience & Loyalty

Enterpret allowed us to listen to specific issues and come closer to our Members - prioritizing feedback which needed immediate attention, when it came to monitoring reception of new releases: Enterpret picked up insights for new updates and became the eyes of whether new systems and functionality were working well or not.

Louise Sellars

Analyst, Customer Insights

Enterpret is one of the most powerful tools in our toolkit. It's very Member-friendly. We've been able to share how other teams can modify and self-serve in Enterpret. It's bridged a gap to getting access to Member feedback, and I see all our teams finding ways to use Enterpret to answer Member-related questions.

Dina Mohammad-Laity

VP of Data

The big win-win is our VoC program enabled us to leverage our engineering resources to ship significantly awesome and valuable features while minimizing bug fixes and" keep the lights on" work. Magnifying and focusing on the 20% that causes the impact is like finding the needle in a haystack, especially when you have issues coming from all over the place

Abishek Viswanathan

CPO, Apollo.io

Since launching our Voice of Customer program six months ago, our team has dropped our human inquiry rate by over 40%, improved customer satisfaction, and enabled our team to allocate resources to building features that increase LTV and revenue.

Abishek Viswanathan

CPO, Apollo.io

Enterpret's Gong Integration is a game changer on so many levels. The automated labeling of feedback saves dozens of hours per week. This is essential in creating a customer feedback database for analytics.

Michael Bartimer

Revenue Operations Lead

Enterpret has made it so much easier to understand our customer feedback. Every month I put together a Voice of Customer report on feedback trends. Before Enterpret it would take me two weeks - with Enterpret I can get it done in 3 days.

Maya Bakir

Product Operations, Notion

The Enterpret platform is like the hero team of data analysts you always wanted - the ability to consolidate customer feedback from diverse touch points and identify both ongoing and emerging trends to ensure we focus on and build the right things has been amazing. We love the tools and support to help us train the results to our unique business and users and the Enterpret team is outstanding in every way.

Larisa Sheckler

COO, Samsung Food

Enterpret makes it easy to understand and prioritize the most important feedback themes. Having data organized in one place, make it easy to dig into the associated feedback to deeply understand the voice of customer so we can delight users, solve issues, and deliver on the most important requests.

Lauren Cunningham

Head of Support and Ops

With Enterpret powering Voice of Customer we're democratizing feedback and making it accessible for everyone across product, customer success, marketing, and leadership to provide evidence and add credibility to their strategies and roadmaps.

Michael Nguyen

Head of Research Ops and Insights, Figma

Boll & Branch takes pride in being a data driven company and Enterpret is helping us unlock an entirely new source of data. Enterpret quantifies our qualitative data while still keeping customer voice just a click away, adding valuable context and helping us get a more complete view of our customers.

Matheson Kuo

Senior Product Analyst, Boll & Branch

Enterpret has transformed our ability to use feedback to prioritize customers and drive product innovation. By using Enterpret to centralize our data, it saves us time, eliminates manual tagging, and boosts accuracy. We now gain near real-time insights, measure product success, and easily merge feedback categories. Enterpret's generative AI technology has streamlined our processes, improved decision-making, and elevated customer satisfaction

Nathan Yoon

Business Operations, Apollo.io

Enterpret helps us have a holistic view from our social media coverage, to our support tickets, to every single interaction that we're plugging into it. Beyond just keywords, we can actually understand: what are the broader sentiments? What are our users saying?

Emma Auscher

Global VP of Customer Experience, Notion

The advantage of Enterpret is that we’re not relying entirely on human categorization. Enterpret is like a second brain that is looking out for themes and trends that I might not be thinking about.

Misty Smith

Head of Product Operations, Notion

As a PM, I want to prioritize work that benefits as many of our customers as possible. It can be too easy to prioritize based on the loudest customer or the flavor of the moment. Because Enterpret is able to compress information across all of our qualitative feedback sources, I can make decisions that are more likely to result in positive outcomes for the customer and our business.

Duncan Stewart

Product Manager

We use Enterpret for our VoC & Root Cause Elimination Program - Solving the issues of aggregating disparate sources of feedback (often tens of thousands per month) and distilling it into specific reasons, with trends, so we can see if our product fixes are reducing reasons.