Exclusive Interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer, UserTesting

In the age of data and artificial intelligence, there is still a lot of room for false assumptions and misleading conclusions which come in way of assessing the product accurately. Make one wrong presumption and the company suffers in a long term, in terms of revenue and customer loyalty. Being open to reviews and taking the initiative to improve based on feedback sometimes would amount to a lazy attitude, for the market is quite demanding and it takes no excuse for not putting your best foot forward in the first attempt. UserTesting, is a video-based user experience (UX) testing service company that helps companies test their products thoroughly before releasing them into the market. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer, of UserTesting.

1. Kindly brief us about your role at UserTesting and your journey in this highly promising sector?

In my current role as Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, I am focused on a few things:

• First, I spend as much time as I can in the industry and with customers. I learn something new every day. If I'm not talking to at least one customer a day, I am not doing my job.

• Second, I take the things I'm learning about our industry and our customers and I translate that into trends and learnings for both external audiences and our employees. I articulate many of these key learnings in The Human Insight podcast I co-host with the UserTesting CEO and the User Tested book I co-authored with the UserTesting CEO.

• Finally, I represent our customers at the exec and board levels. We have amazing exec operators that lead functions like sales, marketing, and engineering, but I can provide a unique and valuable perspective by being the voice of our customers that informs key decisions and strategies.

2. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

UserTesting is a leader in video-based human insight. We enable organizations to understand what it's like to be their customer through first-hand experience testing and access to a global, opt-in network of contributors.

Ranked #1 by G2 Crowd in the User Research, Software Testing, and Consumer Video Feedback categories, UserTesting has been a trusted company by top brands for 15 years. UserTesting is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has approximately 2,500 customers including more than half of the world's top 100 most valuable brands according to Forbes.

3. Please brief us about the products/uses/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

The UserTesting Human Insight Platform gives anyone in an organization the ability to watch real people engage with their products, apps, or services, and easily get a vivid, first-person understanding of the experience. This allows them to deepen their intuition of who their current and future customers are and build greater customer empathy.

4. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?  

We help product and design teams build better, validated products, more quickly so they can drive customer usage, engagement, and retention. With the UserTesting Human Insight Platform, organizations are also able to build better digital experiences–and efficiently optimize conversion rates and drive revenue across digital channels. In addition, we help companies build more scalable and efficient research practices and provide UX and research pros with a solution for qualitative customer feedback.

5. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Through the platform, you watch real people, who have all opted-in to share their perspectives, while they engage with products, apps, services, and other digital and real-world experiences. What's transformational is that you get results often within a few hours, enabling you to bring human insight into everything you do. This helps our customers innovate faster and create better experiences, ultimately driving growth, increasing customer loyalty, and expanding market share. 

6. How C-suites can leverage data to deliver business value to your organization?

In a business world where customer sentiment and loyalties can shift overnight, the C-suite has realized that getting customers to stay long-term with their companies now requires an authentic demonstration of customer empathy. Today's CEOs clearly recognize the impact of empathy on their organization's success. In a recent study we commissioned with FORTUNE Brand Studio: "The ROI of Empathy", 90% of CEOs named it 'important' or 'very important' and 79% indicated that it also has a substantial or major impact on financial performance. 

7. How does your company's rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning?           

We leverage purpose-built machine learning models trained on UserTesting data to focus on the moments that matter–quickly surface customer intent and sentiment, and understand trends in keywords and opinions so that our customers can build a deeper understanding of the customer experience. Our technology offers powerful, interactive visualizations (interactive path flows, keyword map, intent path, sentiment path) and provides actionable insights by automatically identifying trends, patterns, and anomalies across customer experience narratives.

8. Where do you see growth coming in for the sector?

As consumers become more aware of how companies are tracking and using their data and as legislation limits what companies can collect, we are moving towards a cookieless future. This means that companies need to pivot; they can't rely on third-party data and other surveillance methods. They need to find new and innovative ways to gather feedback through opt-in approaches. And that's exactly where solutions like UserTesting come into play. Our global, opt-in network of contributors allows for any company to tap into a community that is ready to provide their authentic perspectives in a way that doesn't unknowingly capture or track their data.

9. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

We're just getting started. Most companies aren't gathering human insight and if they are, it's usually not programmatic or scaled. As companies wake up to the power and importance of creating a deep, empathic connection with their customers, we will see massive growth and adoption. And as tech continues to power the collection and analysis of human insight, these learnings can be captured and applied at the pace modern companies operate today.