The magic of finding the unknown unknowns in customer feedback

Tiffany Go

Head of Product Marketing

March 21, 2024

Large volumes of customer feedback make it overwhelming and challenging to separate signal from noise. Being able to find essential insights, aka your proverbial needle in the haystack, is when product teams can make magic happen.

Imagine if you could surface insights you didn't know to look for. This is what we like to call “finding the unknown unknowns.” or Anomalies in Enterpret. In these moments, companies can use feedback to elevate customer experiences and stand out from their competition by finding what their users care about most when it matters most.

Finding the big thing before it actually becomes a problem

Anomalies are significant deviations from standard patterns in your feedback data, manifesting as unexpected spikes or dips in volume, sentiment, or content.

In the context of feedback and product development, Anomalies are not just statistical outliers but critical indicators of underlying issues or successes in your product or service. Paying close attention to these anomalies can uncover valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden.

How to Uncover Anomalies with the Z-Score

The heart of accurate anomaly detection lies in the Z-Score. The Z-Score is a statistical measure that indicates how far a data point is from the mean using standard deviations. (More about the Z-Score from Khan Academy.)

A Z-Score helps determine whether a feedback point is typical or unusual, providing a consistent basis for identifying noteworthy trends or patterns in user feedback.

Visualizing Feedback Data: Techniques

Visualization plays a crucial role in harnessing the power of feedback data. At Enterpret, we offer two essential types of graphs to aid in this endeavor:

Bar Charts: These provide a clear, side-by-side comparison of different data categories, helping you quickly grasp the aggregate of various feedback aspects.
Trends + Anomalies Chart: This specialized chart highlights significant deviations from standard feedback patterns, enabling you to spot anomalies easily.

Use Cases of Anomalies

Understanding anomalies can serve many purposes, from identifying product issues and ongoing monitoring of trends, problems, or the impact of new features to assessing marketing effectiveness and improving customer support. These insights allow businesses to make informed decisions, enhance user experience, and drive product success. Use cases include:

Identifying product issues: Spot sudden harmful feedback spikes to address potential problems.
Monitoring feature impact: Gauge user reception of new features or updates through feedback changes.
Assessing marketing effectiveness: Detect successful campaigns via increased positive feedback or tracked keyword mentions.
Detecting opportunities: Discover areas of excellence by identifying sudden increases in positive feedback or reasons.
Improving customer support: Evaluate support quality and identify improvement areas.

Using Enterpret for Anomaly Detection

Enterpret sets the default Z-Score for anomalies at 1.5, which can be customized to suit your analysis needs better. Adjusting the Z-Score threshold allows for more precise filtering of feedback data, enhancing the detection of subtle changes or reducing noise. Learn more about Enterpret Anomalies here.

Use Enterpret to Set Up Anomaly & Visualization Reports

Your team can stay updated on unusual patterns or deviations in your feedback data by subscribing to anomaly reports. These reports are automatically generated and delivered, ensuring you never miss crucial insights. Setting up these reports is straightforward:

Create and save your Quantify Query.
Navigate to the desired dashboard and add your Anomalous Quantify chart.
Subscribe to the dashboard to receive regular anomaly reports.

How Enterpret has helped product teams identify anomalies

Here are some examples of how Enterpret has helped teams with anomaly detection

A retail and real estate investment platform identified a critical bug with Enterpret Anomalies that was making it impossible for its customers to complete a critical action on the platform. Enterpret helped them find the root cause, an integration partner update, and eliminate the bug the same day. Without Enterpret, the team estimated it would have taken weeks to identify, let alone fix, the bug, which would have caused a sizeable dent in revenue.
A popular consumer app launched a new product that allows live calls with celebrities instead of pre-recorded messages. The app launched and saw a significant spike in refund requests/no-shows, and it wondered why. Using Enterpret, the app company noticed that customers needed clarification on the call's time zone. They could ship a fast-follow immediately and saw their metrics improve immediately.

Want help with Anomaly Detection? Enterpret can help!

By leveraging the insights gained from feedback data anomalies, businesses can proactively address issues, capitalize on opportunities for improvement, and better understand their users' needs and preferences. With the right tools and approaches, anomalies can transform from mere data points into powerful catalysts for growth and innovation.

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.