UserTesting Turns Feedback Into Human Insight: The 2023 CRM Conversation Starters
When it comes to collecting user feedback, one company not only aces the test every time, it probably designed the test too. That company is UserTesting, which is fundamentally changing the way digital products and experiences are built and delivered by helping the companies that make them get insights directly from their customers via its proprietary and partner-sourced audience networks around the world.
The centerpiece of the San Francisco-based company’s product portfolio is its Human Insights Platform, a video-first platform that enables companies to see and hear the experiences of real people as they engage with their products, designs, apps, processes, concepts, or brands.
Already setting the standard for customer feedback, UserTesting keeps updating the Human Insights Platform. Just this past July, in a major product re-release, it brought in a string of integrations to connect direct customer feedback with tools and solutions across the product development life cycle; the ability to embed video-based customer feedback and watch it in FigJam, Miro, and InVision’s collaborative tools; the ability to embed UserTesting videos in Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery; the ability to view behavioral patterns on company websites with Contentsquare while connecting them directly to insights from UserTesting; and more efficient ways to uncover common areas of confusion, refine site navigation, and improve the overall customer experience.
Among its other notable integrations this year were with Zoom Video Communications, allowing users to create insights from interviews with recorded Zoom audio transcripts that are run through UserTesting’s machine learning technologies; and FuelCycle, allowing mutual clients to use video feedback from their Fuel Cycle customer communities to improve their products and designs.
And in April UserTesting added artificial intelligence-powered behavioral analytics for friction detection and a Microsoft Teams integration to help companies identify what customers are doing when they’re interacting with products and share insights across their organizations.
A previous large platform update in January provided easier access to content through workspaces that curate tests, drafts, and highlight reels into scannable, personalized views tailored to recent engagement; a screener guidance feature with notifications that help users find contributors and collect their feedback; AI-powered enhancements to its transcription and sentiment analysis features; curated workspace pages to facilitate content discovery by providing better visibility and access to high-value, rich content through an updated view of tests, drafts, and highlight reels; hidden workspaces, offering greater permission controls; and mobile card sorting for video capture of feedback from mobile contributors.
UserTesting also this past year added unique templates for the retail, banking, and health and wellness industries, and other templates to help companies gauge customer reactions to holiday sales, product development, data privacy, and even diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. These add to the more than 100 other templates that were already available through the Human Insights Platform.
“At UserTesting, we are committed to providing companies with rich and actionable experience insights quickly. Companies that can adapt to meet their customers’ needs tend to succeed, and we continuously enhance our platform to ensure that our customers remain competitive in their markets,” says Michelle Engle, chief product officer of UserTesting.
It’s a message that seems to be resonating, and was likely one of the reasons that UserTesting, which was founded in 2007, was acquired earlier this year by software investment firms Thoma Bravo and Sunstone Partners for $1.3 billion. Under Thoma Bravo, UserTesting merged with UserZoom, which Thoma Bravo acquired in April 2022.
A.J. Rohde, a senior partner at Thoma Bravo, says that his company’s acquisition of UserTesting “is a testament to our belief that customer experience is mission-critical to organizations, and the combined company will be well-positioned to further market expansion, accelerate innovation, and provide even greater insights to its customers.”
He further calls the company’s platform “a leading integrated solution that delivers real-time, data-driven feedback to organizations globally.”