A resource and community space for modern marketers, sellers, and builders using customer voice to grow — together.
This hub is built for anyone who wants to do more with the voices of their customers. Whether you're scaling advocacy, building trust with proof, or rethinking how to go to market — you're in the right place.
How-to guides and playbooks for building with customer voice
Campaign-ready templates and swipe files
Benchmark reports and reference best practices
Event recordings, expert sessions, and community spotlights
Ask questions. Share ideas. Trade wins. This is your space.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. The Deeto community connects you with other leaders using customer voice to build better GTM motions, faster-growing brands, and smarter strategies. If you are interested in joining when it launches, sign up below.
Automate advocacy management workflows
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Track and report advocacy impact on revenue
Discover practical guides, templates, and tools to help your team close more deals, faster.
How much do you really know about the customers who use your product? Getting customers to use your product without understanding them is like navigating without a map. You might move forward, but you’re guessing at every turn. Customer research isn’t a side project. It's the infrastructure behind product-market fit, retention, and real growth. The difference between teams that collect feedback and teams that win is what they do with it. This guide covers why customer research is foundational and how to do customer research that’s not just insightful, but connected to the decisions that move your business forward.
Customer research is the structured process of capturing customer voice, including needs, motivations, friction points, and language and connecting it to decisions across product, marketing, and growth. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works. Your target audience may differ from the customers who actually engage with your product, and research helps reveal that gap. With clear insights, you can make better product, marketing, and business decisions that are grounded in reality rather than assumptions.
Start by asking yourself what problem you are trying to solve. Are you trying to understand why customers don’t return? Do you want to refine marketing messaging? Clear objectives help you focus on the research that matters and maximize your return on effort. Without them, it’s easy to end up down a rabbit hole of customer intelligence that doesn’t actually solve the problem at hand.
Do you have a target audience or buyer persona in mind? Create a list of customer segments and prioritize them. If you don’t have a persona yet, now is the time to create one. Personas make research questions specific, contextual, and strategic. Include role and responsibilities, goals and success metrics, challenges and pain points, buying triggers, objections, decision-making processes, and the language they use to describe problems. With this context, your research will be sharper, and the insights far more useful.
There are two main types of customer research: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research uncovers the “why” behind behavior through interviews, focus groups, open-ended surveys, and observation. Quantitative research focuses on patterns and scale, using analytics, larger surveys, polls, or experimental methods like A/B testing. Understanding why customers churn may require qualitative research, while validating how widespread a problem is often requires quantitative research. The strongest research combines both: qualitative to understand the “why” and quantitative to measure the “how often.”
Research is only as good as the questions you ask and the people you ask them to. Strong research requires honesty. That means asking open, neutral questions and resisting the urge to validate assumptions. Instead of asking, “What do you like about our product?” try “What problem were you trying to solve when you started looking?” Instead of “Would you recommend us?” ask “Who would this not be a good fit for?” Speak with a mix of recent buyers, long-term customers, churned accounts, and lost deals. Patterns become clear when perspectives are compared. Capture feedback exactly as it’s given. The words customers use are often more valuable than summarized notes.
Analysis is where research becomes actionable. Look for recurring themes in your data: which problems come up repeatedly, what language customers use to describe value, where frustrations cluster, and what nearly prevented a purchase. Then anchor these insights to business outcomes. Every insight should inform a decision, whether it's messaging and conversion optimization, retention or product expansion. Prioritize feedback from high-value segments or critical customer groups, as differences between groups are often more revealing than averages.
Identifying patterns is only half the work. The other half is embedding what you’ve learned into the way the company runs. If customers describe value in a specific way, that language should appear in messaging. If churn risks follow a pattern, onboarding or renewal processes should adapt. If objections repeat in sales cycles, enablement should evolve. Insights become powerful only when customer voice drives actions, not when it sits in a slide deck.
This is where many teams stall. They capture strong signals but lack a connected system to route those signals to the people and workflows that need them. The companies that close this gap treat customer voice not as a report, but as an operating layer that shapes decisions continuously.
Customer needs don’t stand still, and your research shouldn’t either. Too many teams treat research as a campaign: something to do before a launch, after a churn spike, or when positioning feels off. The strongest companies treat research as a rhythm.
This doesn’t mean constant surveys or endless interviews. It means establishing a deliberate cadence that matches how your business evolves. Some research should be ongoing, like regular interviews across segments, continuous capture of sales and support signals, and tracking shifts in language and expectations. Other research should be milestone-driven, such as before entering a new market, ahead of a major product launch, or when retention patterns shift.
The goal isn’t more feedback. It’s building a living system where customer signals continuously inform execution. When research becomes rhythmic, patterns get clearer, decisions get faster, and alignment gets easier. Instead of rediscovering your customers every quarter, you evolve alongside them.
Structure the conversation around moments that matter rather than general opinions.
Every question should tie back to a business lever, whether messaging, conversion optimization, onboarding, or retention. The more specific the question, the clearer the answers.
Customer research doesn’t have to be heavy, slow, or disconnected from execution. When customer voice is structured, searchable, and embedded in workflows, it becomes a competitive advantage, not a project. Deeto helps teams turn scattered feedback into connected customer intelligence that informs decisions across marketing, sales, and product. Insights stop being static reports and start becoming the operating system for growth.
If you’re looking to make customer research a continuous part of how your company grows, explore how Deeto can help.
Turn customer research into action with 7 clear steps to capture voice and drive smarter growth decisions.
Overview:
Most teams don't lose deals because they lack data. They lose because their understanding of why is delayed, incomplete, or already outdated by the time it's reviewed. In this session, we'll explore how buying behavior, competitive dynamics, and deal momentum shift in real time and why traditional win-loss programs can't keep up.
Instead of treating win-loss as a retrospective exercise, this webinar shows how AI-driven listening turns every buyer interaction into a continuous learning system that evolves as the market evolves.
You’ll learn:
Date: Thursday, February 26, 2022
Time: 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Location: Live Virtual Event (Zoom link sent upon registration)
Speakers:
Shawnna Sumaoang, CMO, Deeto
eams don't lose deals because they lack data. They lose because their understanding of why comes too late.
Overview:
Win-loss analysis reveals why deals close or fall through, but manual methods can't keep pace with modern buying journeys. When 70% of B2B decisions happen before a rep is involved, relying on sales notes alone means missing the full story. This guide shows you how AI-driven video and voice interviews transform win-loss from post-mortem to proactive intelligence.
Spotlight:
Inside, you'll find a practical framework for revenue teams who want to capture authentic buyer insight at scale. Learn how AI-powered interviews replace slow, consultant-led processes with continuous feedback loops that surface themes, predict outcomes, and guide strategy in real time. See how one B2B company improved win rates by 27% after replacing manual analysis with AI-driven intelligence.
What to Expect:
Why It Matters:
Buyers make decisions faster than ever, often without ever speaking to sales. Win-loss programs that depend on reps' memories or quarterly consultant reports arrive too late to matter. When teams use AI to capture authentic buyer voice continuously, they don't just understand what happened, they also predict what's next and act with confidence.
Download the guide and turn win-loss into the continuous buyer intelligence that drives sharper positioning, faster cycles, and higher win rates.
This guide shows you how AI-driven interviews transform win-loss from manual post-mortems into real-time buyer insight.
Overview:
Retention drives growth, but most teams still measure it in hindsight. Quarterly surveys and annual reviews capture isolated moments, not the full customer story. This guide shows you how AI-driven continuous listening turns customer signals into proactive retention strategies.
Spotlight:
Inside, you'll find a practical framework for customer success and experience teams who want to move from reactive metrics to predictive intelligence. Learn how continuous listening captures sentiment, engagement, and behavioral signals in real time, helping you detect risk before it becomes churn and identify advocates ready to fuel growth.
What to Expect:
Why It Matters:
Customer voice isn't episodic, it's continuous. When companies listen across every touchpoint and act on signals in real time, they don't just retain customers. They strengthen relationships that grow with trust, turn satisfied customers into enthusiastic advocates, and build retention into a shared system that drives lasting growth.
Download the guide and turn retention from a backward-looking metric into the proactive intelligence that powers growth.
This guide shows you how to turn retention from reactive metrics into proactive intelligence with AI-driven signals.
Overview:
Product feedback should drive innovation, but most teams are drowning in scattered inputs across tickets, Slack threads, and survey tools. This guide shows you how to turn feedback chaos into connected intelligence that builds better products.
Spotlight:
Inside, you'll find a practical framework for product managers who want to move from reactive to proactive. Learn how companies like Cymulate consolidated four data sources into one unified hub, cutting feedback review cycles from three weeks to three days while increasing roadmap confidence by 40%.
What to Expect:
Why It Matters:
Customer voice isn't a program. It's the intelligence system that powers how modern companies build, prioritize, and innovate. When feedback becomes structured and connected, product teams gain faster cycles, stronger alignment, and products that resonate deeply with their market.
Download the guide and transform scattered feedback into the strategic insight that drives confident decisions.
This guide shows you how to turn product feedback into confident decisions without the manual chaos.
Most organizations are listening to customers more than ever.
They run surveys. They capture calls. They collect reviews. They ask for feedback at every stage of the lifecycle.
And yet, many still struggle to translate that insight into meaningful action.
The reason is simple: listening creates awareness, but orchestration creates impact.
Customer feedback is abundant. Action is not.
Insights are discussed in meetings, summarized in decks, and reviewed across teams, yet decisions still rely heavily on intuition, habit, or incomplete context.
This gap exists because customer insight often arrives:
Customer orchestration closes this gap by connecting insight directly to execution.
Customer orchestration is not automation for its own sake. It is the coordination of customer intelligence across people, systems, and moments.
It ensures that:
In practice, orchestration turns customer intelligence into infrastructure.
Modern organizations move quickly. Decisions can’t wait for quarterly reviews or manual analysis.
At the same time, trust has never mattered more. Customers expect to be heard, understood, and responded to meaningfully.
Customer orchestration enables both speed and credibility.
It allows teams to:
Many organizations treat customer voice as a collection of signals. Each signal matters, but none of them tell the full story on their own.
Customer orchestration connects those signals into a system that:
This shift transforms customer voice from something teams check into something they operate from.
The future isn’t about listening more. It’s about building better systems.
Systems that respect the complexity of customer relationships.
Systems that adapt as customer needs change.
Systems that help teams act with clarity instead of guesswork.
Customer orchestration is that system.
And for organizations ready to move beyond fragmented insight toward coordinated action, it is quickly becoming the foundation for growth, retention, and innovation.
Learn how customer orchestration turns feedback into aligned action, faster decisions, and lasting trust.
Today marks an important milestone for Deeto.
We’re introducing a new evolution of the platform and a clear shift in how customer intelligence is built, shared, and acted on across modern organizations.
This is more than an update. It’s a rethinking of how customer insight should function inside the business.
Customer insight has expanded far beyond the systems originally designed to manage it.
What once came from periodic surveys or occasional reference calls now shows up everywhere: sales conversations, customer interviews, lifecycle campaigns, renewal discussions, and ongoing engagement. The challenge is no longer collecting feedback. It’s making sense of it, connecting it, and acting on it consistently.
Most teams still rely on a patchwork of tools and processes to do this work:
As a result, customer voice often informs decisions inconsistently or too late to matter.
We built the new Deeto to change that.
What this shift enables is something most teams have struggled to achieve at scale: continuous customer research.
Not research as a quarterly study or isolated initiative, but research as an always-on understanding of customer needs, sentiment, and context grounded in real interactions.
In this model, research is no longer separate from execution. It is embedded directly into how the business listens, learns, and acts.
At its core, Deeto is now an agentic platform for customer orchestration.
That means customer voice is no longer treated as static input or a collection of artifacts. Instead, it becomes a living system that continuously listens, learns, analyzes, and activates across teams.
In practice, this means Deeto actively monitors customer signals, connects context across people and accounts, and helps guide what should happen next as conditions change.
Customer orchestration ensures that:
The new Deeto experience is built around a simple operating model that reflects how insight should move through an organization.
Listen: Capture authentic customer voice continuously, not episodically, through AI-powered interviews and structured engagement that allow customers to share insights naturally and with context.
Learn: Organize customer intelligence around real entities such as accounts, contacts, and assets in a shared system of record that is structured, searchable, and accessible.
Analyze: Surface patterns, sentiment, and trends in real time so teams can answer the questions that matter now without digging through reports or tools.
Activate: Turn insight into action by orchestrating how customer intelligence flows directly into workflows across marketing, sales, customer success, and product.
This is not a linear journey. It’s a continuous loop that strengthens with every interaction.
Customer orchestration isn’t about serving one team better. It’s about aligning every team around the same source of truth.
With Deeto:
Customer intelligence is no longer a side system.
It’s becoming the operating system.
Learn more by checking out our launch event on-demand, or reach out and request a demo.
Deeto introduces a new agentic platform for customer orchestration—turning continuous customer intelligence into action
Customer voice has never been more available than it is today.
Organizations have access to more feedback, conversations, and customer signals than ever before. Sales calls are recorded. Surveys are automated. Reviews surface instantly. Customers are constantly sharing what they think, what they need, and what they value.
And yet, most companies still struggle to turn customer voice into meaningful action.
Not because they aren’t listening. But because listening alone isn’t enough.
For years, customer programs have focused on collection. More surveys. More feedback forms. More dashboards. More data.
What that has created is not clarity, but fragmentation.
Customer voice lives in too many places. Feedback sits in one system. Stories live in another. Engagement data is somewhere else entirely. Each team pulls what they need when they need it, often manually and often too late.
As a result:
The issue isn’t effort. It’s structure.
Most organizations still treat customer voice as a program owned by a single team. Customer marketing runs advocacy. Customer success manages sentiment. Product gathers feedback. Sales looks for proof when deals stall.
Each effort is well-intentioned. None of them are connected.
But customer voice doesn’t exist in silos. It spans the entire lifecycle. It shows up before a deal closes, during onboarding, throughout adoption, and at renewal. Its meaning only emerges when signals are connected across time, teams, and accounts.
This is where orchestration matters.
Customer orchestration means customer voice is not managed by one function. It is coordinated across the business through a shared system.
Orchestration connects:
Without orchestration, customer voice remains powerful but underutilized. With orchestration, it becomes a decision-making engine.
Traditional customer intelligence is static. It’s collected, stored, reviewed, and reported periodically.
Modern customer intelligence must be dynamic.
It needs to evolve as customers evolve. It needs to surface insight in real time. It needs to adapt to what each team needs in the moment they need it.
That requires moving beyond dashboards and point solutions toward a system that can:
This shift isn’t incremental. It’s foundational.
It changes customer voice from something teams check into something they operate from.
At Deeto, we’ve spent the last year rebuilding our platform around a simple belief: customer voice should be orchestrated, not managed.
Not as a campaign.
Not as a library.
But as a living system that listens, learns, and acts across the business.
In the days ahead, we’ll share more about this next chapter, including how customer orchestration changes the way teams operate and why it’s becoming a critical capability for modern organizations.
Customer voice is powerful.
Orchestration is what finally unlocks it.
Customer voice is everywhere, but action is rare. Learn why orchestration is the key to turning customer insight into re
In this episode of Authentic Customer Voices, we sit down with Amber Heffner, Director of Strategic Growth at ParentSquare, to explore how her team built an advocacy program that scales without sacrificing authenticity, empathy, or trust. From spreadsheets and scattered permissions to a structured, AI-enabled system, Amber shares how ParentSquare transformed advocacy into a consistent, human-centered part of the customer journey. We cover how her team identifies “moments that matter,” celebrates everyday wins, and builds lasting relationships that drive both engagement and pipeline impact.
[Podcast Intro – Host]
Welcome to the Authentic Customer Voices podcast, where we spotlight leaders reshaping how organizations listen, grow, and lead through the power of customer voice. Today's guest is Amber Heffner, the Director of Strategic Growth at ParentSquare, where she leads with purpose, empathy, and a deep commitment to meaningful engagement with their customers.
From orchestrating advisory boards to designing moments that matter across the customer journey, Amber is pioneering a more human-centered approach to advocacy in education. In this episode, we'll unpack how Amber and her team are scaling authentic connection without scaling headcount. Why small moments of recognition have outsized impact on trust, participation, and long-term growth.
With that, let's dive in.
When you first looked at ParentSquare's advocacy program, what were the biggest challenges or gaps that you were seeing?
[Amber Heffner]
I did have to laugh, Shawnna, because we definitely were that crew that had spreadsheets and Airtables and docs and Google Drive folders, and so everything was all over the place. Some salespeople were using this and some were using that. We knew we had amazing, happy customers, but advocacy was feeling like it was happening by chance. We would scramble to find someone for Sales or Marketing who wanted a story. And as you mentioned earlier, we'd go back to the same group of people to pull those quotes from. And permissions—did we actually have their permission to use these quotes we had in all these different places? That was a big one for me.
When we started building our advocacy program, we knew what we had in place wasn't scalable, and it wasn't a great fit for the customer either. We did not have a formal advocacy program before Deeto. What we had were great relationships and individual efforts, but not a system. The challenges I mentioned were exactly what led us to find Deeto. Partnering with Deeto gave us the opportunity to build our advocacy program from the ground up in a way that respected our customers' time and also gave us an opportunity to highlight the amazing things they were doing.
[Host]
What made you decide to focus on what you refer to as the "moments that matter" when asking customers to participate?
[Amber Heffner]
I love this aspect of it. What it always felt like before was, "Oh, we need something now, we're coming to you." Now with Deeto, we're able to go to our customers and we may even go to them with a story already in place. Like, "Hey, we heard you were rock stars during implementation. You shared this special story with our implementation manager, and now we want to highlight it." We're celebrating the great things they're doing.
When a district has a big win, launches a new feature, or hits a milestone, we're there to celebrate it with them. We curate that content and put it out into the world to highlight them and put them on a pedestal. It really was more than just filling a content gap. Our customers are educators and leaders passionate about making a difference. They are inspired every day in the work they do. The stories they share help us too, because they also help others learn how ParentSquare can help in their engagement with families.
[Host]
How has Deeto helped change the way your team finds and activates advocates?
[Amber Heffner]
It's been such a game changer. Before we had Deeto, we knew we had great customers and great stories, but it was about finding a way to curate that content and highlight it. We spent time trying to track down customers willing to join a webinar, give product feedback, or participate in pilots. There were times we couldn’t follow through because we couldn’t secure the right advocate.
With Deeto, we can see in real time who's ready to raise their hand. The AI makes it easy. We can match them to references or to opportunities like product feedback or webinars. It's engagement that feels natural to them. We're able to say, "Hey, we know you raised your hand for a webinar, here's an opportunity." It's not just my team benefiting, it's Product, Marketing, and Sales too. Everyone can quickly find the right fit. We’re spending less time chasing our customers and more time engaging them in meaningful ways.
[Host]
What measurable impact have you seen since rolling out this approach?
[Amber Heffner]
One of my favorite stories is the number of hours we spent tracking down advocates, trying to figure out permissions, and locating spreadsheets. We're estimating we save 100 to 200 hours annually across all tasks like webinar prep and finding the right advocate. We had an example of a salesperson going to an event in Florida who wanted a case study. We went into Deeto, found a Florida ambassador, and flipped their story into a case study in a couple of days. Our marketing team has never been able to do that before.
For social media, our marketing manager can go into Deeto and find specific stories. That alone saves 75 to 80 hours a year. Our pool of advocates has grown dramatically, giving us more content. We've collected nearly 1,500 approved social proof assets that are searchable and ready for Sales, CS, and Marketing.
We are seeing advocacy directly influence pipeline. References and proof points are easily accessible. Sales cycles have improved by 20 to 30%. Manual efforts have been cut by about 30% because teams can go into Deeto and find what they need. Most importantly, we are seeing our advocates more engaged. They're choosing how to participate, being recognized, and showing up to meetings and events as satisfied, engaged customers.
[Host]
What advice would you give to marketing leaders trying to scale advocacy without headcount?
[Amber Heffner]
First, don't overcomplicate it. Start with a clear, high-impact moment and build from there. Lean on tools that do the heavy lifting. For a long time at ParentSquare, it was just me. I was a one-person team for 15 months. Even then, once we found Deeto, we could start building our program. It was the support of our internal team and the strength of Deeto as a platform and a partner.
We don't see Deeto as just a vendor. It has helped us scale far beyond what I could have done alone. You can individualize your advocacy program based on what works for you. Our customers and how we highlight them might be different from how someone else does. Our focus has been to build a program that highlights the amazing things our customers are doing and keeps them engaged. Engaged customers are happy customers, and happy customers spread the word.
Yes, the spreadsheets and the docs and all those tools were frustrating. We knew we couldn’t continue that way. Ultimately, we needed something that highlights our customers. That's why we're in this business. So my advice: keep it simple, lean on great partners, and never lose sight that advocacy is about relationships first.
[Host]
What’s next for advocacy at ParentSquare?
[Amber Heffner]
We’re really excited about broadening advocacy beyond case studies and references and moving into community-style connections. Think regional events where customers learn from each other or where we highlight their stories in their own words. Long term, I want advocacy to feel like part of the journey from day one—something that grows naturally with the relationship.
We’ve built a strong foundation with references and case studies, but that’s just the start. We’re leaning into customer-led storytelling. We’ve added 20 regional events for peer-to-peer communities to spotlight how they engage families. The partnership with Deeto helps us keep advocacy in motion and continuously surface new opportunities.
We love the campaign feature. We just did a back-to-school campaign where our ambassadors shared tips for family engagement. Some of that content is our best yet. We're keeping it fresh and meaningful. We also want to do more social media spotlights and possibly a podcast to highlight our districts.
It feels like a natural extension of the customer journey, and we want it to be seamless from onboarding to renewal, celebrating success every step of the way.
[Host]
A huge thank you to Amber for joining us today and sharing her thoughtful perspectives on scaling advocacy in a way that is deeply intentional and rooted in care. To our audience, thank you for joining us. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast to hear more episodes on leading with customer voice and scaled advocacy. See you next time.
How ParentSquare scales advocacy with AI while staying deeply personal across every step of the customer journey.
See how Deeto helps you turn customer voice into a GTM advantage.
