Building a central repository for customer insight in minutes

An insight repository. Ah… The place where you can easily find all customer insights at your fingertips. Wish that was true.

I’ve interviewed over 500 product teams in the last 3 years and reviewed with them among other things their customer insights repositories (also referred to as research repositories). There were outstanding teams I had the honor talking to but overall I saw 3 major patterns emerge:

• Low insight consumption in repos: In repos, well prepared and labeled insights are easily searchable and accessible to anyone in the company. But just like the internet offering endless sources of literature to read - we did not start to read more literature with the rise of the internet. Access doesn’t equal consumption. Low adoption and lack of recurring repo usage by non-researchers has been an overarching pattern I observed.
  

• Searchability is limited: Think about an insight repository as a database of raw transcripts. You can slice and dice that database along fixed dimensions - along tags. Think of tags as keywords:  when you search for them, you’ll find items in the insight repo, which were labeled with these tags. Since we often cannot anticipate what information will become relevant from a set of user interviews later on, searchability along fixed keywords and tags creates a rift between the product team’s need to find insights for a particular question vs. how insights are findable in a repo. This leads to frustration and plummeting adoption of insight repos by non-researchers.
  

• High maintenance cost: Back in the days, Uber created one of the first insight repositories called Kaleidoscope. They employed 2 people only to ensure insights are documented according to set standards and to check their validity - some insights tend to expire. This was Uber, a massive company which at its peak employed +100 researchers in 2019. But the high fixed cost of maintaining quality and relevance in a research repo persists irrespective of company size.

The solution is not obvious

To state the obvious, I’m not the first one to come across these shortcomings - I learned them from product teams experiencing them. They are creative and have employed a number of strategies to boost insight consumption:

Tomer Sharon used to share handpicked video snippets with teams delivering insights that matter to them. Many researchers I’ve spoken with push insights into Slack because this is the place where their colleagues consume information. 

There are other approaches too, like involving the product team more in research. Inviting them to sessions and recaps. The underlying idea being that they can contribute to finding better insights and higher involvement in the process will translate to higher consumption of insights.

Such strategies do have a positive impact on consumption but you’ll also notice a common denominator: they all require continuous & manual effort from research to keep the engagement high. 

Is there no way around?

The economic mind

The human brain evolved to be a highly efficient economic powerhouse. You can observe it in your own lives: there is so much that our mind does on autopilot, without thinking or deciding. We also tend to cherish habits, doing the same things at the same time. (Also think about how long we hold on to our world views even in the light of contradicting evidence.)

Why should it be different in work?

It isn’t. So we need an economic & habit building solution. A great inspiration just happens to be around the corner: Google. 

We’ve all developed a habit over the course of the last +20 years and turn to Google whenever we don’t know something. We type in some keywords or questions and Google gets us the most relevant hits likely to answer our questions.

We need a Google like solution. A tool in which you don’t need to do all the manual analysis to distill highlights (like highlighting, tagging, etc.) and you could get more relevant insights from user sessions for any question you may have. It would tick a few boxes:

• Easy to build: all you need is to centralize your customer calls in one place
• Unlimited searchability: No constraints by tags to find insights. Like in Google, you can ask any question giving you the ability to make the full potential of you call database
• Habit building: The speed of asking and getting relevant insights allows us to use this repo live in meetings but also for micro decisions in our daily works

How to build your next generation insight repository in Airtime

Airtime turns user calls into product insights. Using the video or audio recordings of calls, Airtime identifies & interprets recurring feedback patterns within seconds for up to 1000 calls in a single analysis. 

If you have a specific question, Airtime will pull together all relevant feedback for you so you can have a holistic view of customer feedback.

To build an insight repo, all you need to do is to move all recorded customer calls into Airtime and start asking questions like you do on Google.

No manual work with highlighting, defining labels, tags or keywords.

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Here is a 1 minute demo to give you a glimpse:

It couldn’t be more simple to give Airtime a spin:

• Create a free Airtime account
• Transfer call recordings into Airtime
• List your questions to learn what your users said about those topics
• If you want more context, you can click on the timestamp and listen to the actual recording

Done.

Check out Airtime using our free trial or book a short demo with us if you’d like to discuss how to best use Airtime for your use cases.