Why CarGurus chose unitQ “to understand customer feedback across various customer segments”

Christina Valente, Senior Director of Product Operations at CarGurus, leverages her Product Operations expertise to empower a team of global product managers with deep, actionable customer insights. Understanding customer feedback and addressing user pain points effectively is not just a nice to have, but a cornerstone of CarGurus' product strategy.

“Customer insights is one of our primary pillars,” Christina said during a recent panel discussion at the Chief Product Officer Summit in New York.

The challenge of understanding customer insights at CarGurus is multifaceted. With a myriad of feedback coming from various channels such as app reviews, NPS surveys, Salesforce and more, it became difficult to decipher insights quickly from a single source of truth as customer data has been fragmented and difficult to parse, Christina said. The absence of a common taxonomy to classify feedback alongside the complexity of data sources, made it difficult for product managers to draw actionable insights in real-time.

It was clear, Christina said, that CarGurus, the most visited automotive shopping site in the United States (CARG), was in need of a scalable user-feedback solution.

Buy versus build approach

The inability to efficiently glean actionable insights from user feedback led to the pivotal decision to integrate unitQ into CX, product and engineering workflows at CarGurus. Christina and her team recognized that building a custom solution from scratch was impractical as it would set them back by months and require internal resources. Instead, CarGurus opted for a buy versus build approach, choosing unitQ for its robust capabilities and native integrations into existing software and tools.

A riddling introduction

Before Christina spoke, unitQ Director of Product Brett Caplan introduced her with a two-part riddle to prime the crowd. He asked, “What's black and white and red all over?”
Someone from the audience answered: “Is it a newspaper?”
“No, an embarrassed penguin,” Brett replied.
After the laughter, Brett asked a similar question:
“So now, what's black and white and mostly unread?”
Many from the audience jokingly answered:
“A newspaper?”
“I was thinking of most user feedback — a little more thematic to what we’re here today for,” Brett continued, handing the discussion to Christina.

Out-of-the-box integrations

Christina said that unitQ not only supported the complexity of the CarGurus marketplace but also allowed her team to dissect and understand customer feedback across various customer segments.

“unitQ has out-of-the box integrations for about 80% of our data sources, and the other 20% they committed to building. unitQ is able to support the complexity of our marketplace,” she said.

Land and expand

Christina said that, as the adoption of unitQ progressed at CarGurus, it became apparent that the unitQ customer feedback analytics platform could serve broader purposes beyond initial expectations.

“As I started having conversations with key stakeholders across the organization about unitQ, we started to explore some additional use cases that we'd be able to use for unitQ,” she said.

Christina said unitQ has empowered internal discussions around customer experiences not just within product teams but across sales, support and marketing departments — aligning all teams around common customer issues.

CarGurus conclusions

The introduction of unitQ at CarGurus under Christina's leadership is transforming how CarGurus approaches customer feedback. It enables a holistic view that quantifies customer sentiment and satisfaction, helping CarGurus refine their product offerings and better meet the needs of customers. The journey with unitQ at the helm of their customer insight strategy is just beginning. unitQ's potential to drive significant improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency is immense, Christina said.