How Packhelp Mastered Customer Feedback to Become a Custom Packaging Leader

The fastest lane to build a product people love is through customer feedback.

Most online businesses track user behavior metrics to learn more about their audiences. And while the numerical data is valuable, it only tells half the story. Analytics tools show where your online customers come from, convert, or churn, but they don’t reveal the “why” behind their actions.

Gathering customer feedback is the most efficient way to cut the guesswork from product development—provided you have the right survey software.

That’s why Packhelp, a one-stop-shop for custom packaging, started running surveys with Survicate. Our survey tool helped them set up a customer feedback loop and introduce NPS and CSAT as company-wide success metrics, making product and business decisions faster and more informed.

Patryk Kabaj, the Chief Product Officer at Packhelp, told us:

• why he and his colleagues had turned to survey software
• why they’d chosen Survicate
• and how they’d used it to improve product management and development
  

Why Packhelp Needed to Capture Customer Feedback

Packhelp is an online marketplace for custom packaging. Since its launch in 2016, it’s issued over 50 million packages and served 50,000 customers from more than 30 markets. Its offer extends to micro, small and medium businesses as well as enterprise and wholesale clients.

Packhelp grew more than 2.5 times over the last year, and their expansion is far from over. In November 2021, the company secured a €40 million Series B round, and it expects to grow at least two times in 2022. 

No matter your company size, Packhelp will cover all your packaging needs fast. In most cases, the price estimations are done on the spot so that you can finalize your order within a day.

Packhelp’s quality and efficiency earned them a lot of loyal customers—but like any ambitious business, they knew there was always room for improvement.

Packhelp had already been using analytics tools to collect data on customer behavior, but they realized it wasn’t enough. They decided to ask their customers what motivated their behavior—with a bit of help from a survey software.

Patryk Kabaj, Packhelp’s CPO, understood that the company could benefit from customer feedback in three ways:

Steer product development in the right direction

There’s the only way to know if you’re doing a good job as a product manager: confirming that your product is useful. And there’s no other way to do it than just asking your customers.

“You’re creating stuff for people,” Patryk told us, “so you have to confirm you’re doing the right job.”

Learn new things from your customers

You don’t know what your customers think until you ask them. 

Customer feedback helps you look at your product from a fresh perspective and open your mind to new ideas. Patryk admitted that the customers had pointed out product issues he’d never anticipated.

Streamline business and product decisions

If you already know your users’ needs, you won’t waste time making hypotheses and testing them on the job. “Unless you ask,” Patryk told us, “you're just going to sit with your team, [bouncing off] ideas, and nothing is going to push you towards the right place as fast as you need it. In a fast-moving startup, there’s no time for guessing.”

But to successfully capture customer feedback, you need to ask questions at the right place and at the right time. Patryk’s team realized they needed a flexible survey software that would let them reach out to the users at all journey stages — browsing the website, using the software, or placing the order.

Enter: Survicate.

Survicate: Smart Integrations & Multiple Use Cases

The main thing that drove Packhelp towards Survicate was the Segment integration.

It was the Packhelp CEO himself, Wojtek Sadowski, who tried out the tool first. As a Segment user, he was glad to have an opportunity to connect the two apps for better data analysis. 

Soon, he realized that the tool was exactly what he needed - he could quickly start running the survey himself. The time and effort needed to launch it was minimal compared to other survey tools he’d tried before. As Patryk told us:

“Survicate was really easy to install, and thanks to Segment, our CEO, Wojtek, was able to put [a survey] online within a couple of minutes and start asking questions.”

Packhelp planned to use Survicate only for a simple website survey that asked one question: “What are you looking for on our website?”

The survey turned out to be a huge success, attracting over 10,000 answers! The speed and ease of survey creation encouraged Patryk’s team to try out product surveys as well.

Soon, the product team launched a feedback capturing campaign. And the company decided to switch to Survicate’s paid plan to collect more responses.

Survicate turned out to be useful in many different use cases.

How Packelp Used Survicate to Gather Customer Feedback and Shape Product Strategy 

Packhelp launched multiple survey campaigns to investigate website usability, product satisfaction, product-market fit, and churn reasons. 

With Survicate’s help, Packhelp:

• Ran +50 surveys
• Collected + 30,000 responses
• Hit a +10% survey response rate (with +50% response rate)
  

Patryk shared Packhelp’s most successful survey stories with us. Read on to learn how to drive the product strategy home with surveys!

Identifying low-quality traffic and optimizing conversion rates with website feedback surveys

Packhelp’s first survey was launched on their home page.

The team ran a simple pop-up survey with one question: “What are you looking for on our website?".

To their surprise, the survey attracted over 10,000 respondents. Their answers shed light on Packhelp’s website traffic quality. In Patryk’s words:

"It struck us that about 40% of people were just browsing, and there was no intention of purchasing."

It became clear that the company needed to attract more quality leads and make the offer more appealing to current visitors.

On top of that, they discovered that many website users couldn’t find what they needed. This meant that there were still some business areas left for Packhelp to explore.

The product team used qualitative feedback to redesign their homepage. Then, they ran A/B tests to track if the changes were going in the right direction.

The website usability survey insights turned out to be helpful from the product team’s perspective as well. They recognized which products mattered most for which customer type and improved their user segmentation.

Reaching out to lost clients with a churn reason survey

After the successful website survey campaign, Packhelp decided to launch more surveys. Since Survicate offers unlimited seats, many other teams—like Sales, Design, or CRM - set up their own campaigns.

One of these surveys was a churn reason survey. It asked Packhelp’s regular customers why they were no longer placing recurring orders.

The results were astonishing again. It turned out that many customers didn’t really churn. Some simply didn’t order packages because their demand dropped - once the initial online shopping craze caused by COVID-19 subsided. However, they were more than ready to use Packhelp again once the tide turned.

These learnings helped Packhelp tailor-fit the communication to these customers… and relax!

Evaluating existing features and discovering new ideas with a product satisfaction survey

The product team led by Patryk launched an in-product survey campaign. They wanted to investigate product satisfaction, get feature feedback, and scout for new ideas—to complement the qualitative data on product adoption and retention.

The team quickly learned which parts of their product were the main success drivers. As Patryk told us:

It's the simple stuff that people need most. Simple, effective UX. You can read it between the lines from the answers: it's not some new exciting features, it's the ‘boring’ stuff helping people make informed choices.

The product feedback they received turned out to be very favorable—even for new or updated features, like the editor for designing custom packages.

“We got, like, 84% CSAT, (...) it was surprising to me that [the score] was so high,” Patryk shared.

The team also discovered a few feature ideas. For example, it turned out that many users wanted to see the designs’ real-life dimensions in Packhelp editor. The demand for a centimeter ruler-type feature was so high that adding it to the product was a no-brainer!

Assessing business and product strategy with a product-market fit survey

Finally, the product team set out on a quest to evaluate the product-market fit based on Superhuman CEO’s framework.

The survey results revealed that Packhelp’s product-market fit was incredible. Over 40% of the respondents claimed they would be very disappointed if they could no longer use Packhelp. In some markets, the number was even higher.

In the upcoming months, Packhelp started measuring NPS (Net Promoter Score) as a company-wide success metric instead. “Still,” Patryk told us, “thanks to [the product-market fit] survey, we've realized what people value and what we should work on.”

Making Better Product Decisions with Survicate

As Patryk told us:

"[​​We] use the survey answers to drive the strategy of the company and to affect the direction we are going with the product."

Packhelp turned to Survicate to investigate their website’s usability—but seeing how much a simple survey can activate their audience and how flexible Survicate is, they stayed for more.

Survicate helped Packhelp measure customer satisfaction and collect feedback across all customer journey stages. The multiple use cases and distribution channels made Survicate useful for different departments across the company.

The survey insights fueled product, marketing, and business decisions. Packhelp used them to:

• redesign their website
• improve communication with inactive customers
• prioritize the right features on the product roadmap
• make product improvements based on the customers’ recommendations.

Empower your business with Survicate's insights - start today!