How to Connect Customer Feedback to Business Outcomes

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By
Natalia Dwórznik
Last Updated:
March 18, 2026
Reading time:
13 minutes

We spoke with Marley Dizney Swanson, Senior UX Researcher at MPB to learn how they use feedback and customer insights as the foundation to drive tangible business results.

Key takeaways:

• Marley's fundamental rule: always set a benchmark before starting any new work - understand exactly what metric you're targeting and your current baseline.
• Using this philosophy, at MPB Marley combines qualitative customer feedback with specific business metrics (NPS, conversion, revenue, GMV), ensuring teams know with confidence whether their work genuinely impacts both CX and business results.
• By quantifying qualitative feedback, Marley is able to build compelling business cases executives can't ignore - showing the true impact of customer issues.
• This approach led to a new requirement: every product decision at MPB now requires evidence linking to specific business metrics - whether it's return rates, GMV, or conversion - ensuring resources go toward problems that actually affect the bottom line.

A conversation with Marley Dizney Swanson, Senior UX Researcher at MPB

Q: Can you tell us what being a mixed methods researcher means, and how it plays out in your work at MPB?
Marley: Being a mixed-methods researcher essentially means I'm a storyteller with multiple ways to tell that story. At MPB, we leverage extensive quantitative data to understand how customers behave on our platform, tracking key metrics like revenue and GMV.
I then enrich this data with qualitative insights from interviews, usability testing, and NPS survey results that come through Chattermill. By triangulating these different data points, we can confidently determine whether our work is truly making an impact on our customers' experience.

Q: How big is the team, and how are you working with the wider product organization?
Marley: Our product design team is about six people, and I'm the sole researcher supporting an organization of over 500. To address this scale, we've invested heavily in empowering team members to conduct their own research.
We have six scrum teams with product managers, engineers, designers, copywriters, and visual designers. Through monthly seminars, I teach them essential research skills - conducting interviews, designing surveys, and other techniques - so they can handle their own research while I focus on synthesizing insights across projects and tackling strategic initiatives.

Q: As the only researcher, how do you handle all the questions coming from the business and product teams?
Marley: We do have a backlog of things that we've just not been able to answer yet. But one way we prioritize the research requests coming in is by using hypothesis statements.
We'll say, "Unlocking this information would allow me to do X, and we predict Y outcome." This framework allows us to assess whether the issue is urgent, whether it impacts a really big metric, or if it's something that will unlock future work. That way, we're able to put our efforts where they would be best served in that moment.

The challenge: blind spots in customer feedback

Q: What are the biggest challenges you're seeing in product and UX at the moment?
Marley: I think the biggest problem we have right now is that our data lives in a lot of different places. We probably use 10 tools to collect customer feedback, which isn't ideal because it means a lot of our time is spent going from source to source trying to triangulate that data. So we're working with Chattermill to consolidate everything in one place. It means that our NPS survey results, customer service tickets, Trustpilot reviews - all of that will be in one place. We'll have a more automated process of analyzing that feedback, which saves us time and ultimately means we can get to the actual work a lot faster.

Q: What made you consider expanding your use of Chattermill to not only store NPS results, but also gather feedback from across the user journey?
Marley: The instigation for this project was discovering that our NPS survey results, which are what we have in Chattermill right now, only represent 6% of our customer base. And I'm being very intentional about that language - it represents 6% of our customers, but not our wider user base.
We only send out NPS surveys to people who have successfully transacted with us, so we're losing a huge amount of data. We're not capturing feedback from our wider user and potential customer base. So we wanted to work with Chattermill to get everything in one place to understand how we could convert those non-customers into customers. From a UX perspective, we wanted to understand if there were particular funnels they were dropping out of, or usability issues we could address to help them achieve their goal of buying a camera. It's a tricky measurement because when we looked at competitor numbers, it seems like e-commerce can typically expect about 10 to 20% of their customers to give feedback.

Q: What role does customer feedback play in your day-to-day decision-making and UX strategy?
Marley: It's huge - it shapes everything. We use customer insights regularly through voice of the customer forums and reports to keep them at the forefront of decision-makers' minds. When our executive team conducts its annual planning, they have customer feedback in the back of their minds, whether it's specific issues customers have raised or metrics that are trending negatively. This enables them to create roadmaps that directly address customer needs. It's an ongoing process - we're never going to get it exactly right - but the fewer longstanding problems you have, the happier your customers will be.

Using Chattermill day-to-day

Q: Tell me about your experience with Chattermill. How did you start using it, and what were your first impressions?
Marley: Chattermill was being used by my organization before I joined about three years ago. I remember going in and being overwhelmed by the amount of information - I wanted to read every single piece of feedback. It was the best part of my onboarding experience - seeing what customers were saying about the organization helped me frame my first 90 days. I spent a good two full days of my onboarding just on Chattermill - going through feedback, learning how to create reports, making my own dashboards of things that stood out to me, and flagging those up to my manager and team saying, "Hey, are we aware that this is happening?"

Q: How does Chattermill fit into your day-to-day workflow today?
Marley: My day-to-day workflow focuses on the top drivers of negative feedback - that's probably my number one report.
I consider it part of my job to raise any key customer concerns to our team to ensure our core journeys are being taken care of. I'm also using Chattermill to train our product managers on how to read qualitative feedback and use it to support their own decisions. A lot of it involves teaching people how to use reports, how to identify trends in qualitative feedback, and figuring out how to share Chattermill data, reports, and dashboards to tell a story. Ultimately, we're trying to convince people to believe in what we believe in, and Chattermill has been a highly effective tool for doing so.

Q: When working on specific projects or product areas, are you looking to answer specific questions or solve particular business problems with customer feedback?
Marley: Yes, and there are two ways we use Chattermill. One is to answer a specific question, and one is for more generative research. When we're answering a question, it'll be something like, "We released a piece of work four weeks ago. Have our customers noticed? Has it made a difference?"
We'll use a lot of quantitative data to support that, but then it's really important to get that qualitative piece to understand the why. Perhaps a metric has shifted, but can we be certain it's actually due to our actions? The qualitative piece helps answer that question for us. Chattermill has also been so valuable in showing us where to focus our efforts. For example, we have these voice of the customer forums once a quarter, and we recently learned through Chattermill that our top driver of negative feedback is customers receiving defective items. We gathered a significant amount of information from Chattermill, brought together 40 people and decision-makers to understand how we could address this problem, and reviewed all the feedback collectively. It's truly remarkable to observe how different individuals interpret the data in distinct ways, leading to varied insights and solutions. We've now got a list of about 30 different action items we want to take based on that data from Chattermill.

Getting started with UX research

Q: What's one thing you wish more product, UX, and research managers knew about using customer feedback effectively?
Marley: Don't take everything at face value. One customer's lived experience, while true for them, doesn't necessarily scale to everyone. The trap is putting efforts toward what's actually a small problem, even if it affects some customers significantly. That's why mixed methods are important - to understand the attitudinal side through qualitative data, then back it up to ensure you're impacting the most people in the most significant way. With limited time and resources, we have to make difficult decisions about which project will create the biggest impact.

Q: If your team had a tagline, what would it be?
Marley: Test before you guess. I have a sticker on the back of my laptop that says it, which I got from UX Insight this year, and I love it.