Case study · GoTo
Building a Customer Insight Flywheel
Challenge
GoTo had no research function and no structured way to reach customers. Decisions ran on sales and churn data, and products like Customer Engagement were failing for lack of customer understanding.
Action
I built the Insiders Program from zero, starting with relationships rather than process. It became a three-tier customer ecosystem wired directly into product decisions.
Impact
Insiders customers retained 30–60% better than customers outside the program. One program came to serve research across GoTo, ITSG, and Grasshopper, and its insights drove GoTo's biggest product turnarounds.
better retention for Insiders customers than customers outside the program
Measuredenrolled members, about 1,000 core active
Measuredactive participants per month
Measuredresearchers served at peak, in one company-wide program across GoTo, ITSG, and Grasshopper
MeasuredAdmin checkout conversion; Insiders research was one input among several
Measured- Organization
- GoTo, across the GoTo, ITSG, and Grasshopper brands
- Role
- Program founder and owner
- Team
- Up to four direct-report researchers (three FTEs, plus Grasshopper's researcher, whom I hired in May 2024; before her, I directed a contract researcher's work) and a program manager I hired. The program also served the 8 researchers in a peer director's org, 12 in all at peak. Partners: Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Product, and Engineering
- Timeframe
- From my first week at GoTo in 2022 through 2026. It ran unnamed, and largely on my own, before it became Insiders
The Challenge
When I joined GoTo, there was no formal research function and no structured way to engage customers. Decisions ran on sales data and churn metrics, which told us what customers did but never why they bought, stayed, or left.
The cost was real. Customer Engagement was underperforming because no one had a clear picture of its customers, their workflows, or their needs. Product and UX worked reactively, there was no segmentation or vertical strategy, and Customer Success guarded its relationships, with good reason.
Mandate: How do we put real customer insight into every product decision, without a research team, without infrastructure, and without disrupting the relationships Customer Success owned?
My Role
| Owned outright | Led | Partnered on |
|---|---|---|
| The program company-wide (GoTo, ITSG, Grasshopper): vision, operating model, governance, and the weekly program meetings | My research team (up to 4 direct reports): hiring (Grasshopper), integration, weekly 1:1s, work direction, standards, promotions (two promoted while reporting to me, a third approved) | Customer access with CSMs, Marketing, and Sales |
| The Insiders roadmap | Research tooling evaluation (Condens and Dovetail) | Embedding insights in product rituals with Product and Engineering |
| Early research and stakeholder alignment, done personally | Adoption across Product, Engineering, Marketing, and CS | Roadmap and prioritization decisions (UX, Product, and Engineering trio) |
| The program's SharePoint hub: IA, navigation, and content | The program manager role I created and hired for |
Approach
1. Relationships before process
It started in my first week. GoTo's side of the business had no researcher, so I asked my VP for one, and she assigned the first. I immediately connected that researcher with Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales. For a long time the program ran unnamed, and largely on my own: no research team, no program infrastructure, and no stakeholder alignment. So the first move was relationships, not process. I met Customer Success Managers one by one, earned their trust, and agreed how we would engage their customers without disrupting those relationships. At the same time I worked with Marketing and Sales to tap the customer touchpoints they already had.
2. Turn an existing program into an engine
Rather than launch something new into a skeptical organization, we took over a fragmented marketing program and rebuilt it as a discovery and validation engine. It now fed Product, UX, and Marketing at once.
3. A three-tier ecosystem customers opt into
Customers joined through community, surveys, CSMs, and Sales, and chose how they wanted to take part:
- ~1,000 core Insiders: surveys, interviews, usability testing, ethnographic research, and alpha and beta programs
- Customer Advisory Board: enterprise customers
- Partner Advisory Board: resellers
At steady state, 200–300 people took part each month, and surveys reached up to 2,000 customers. Continuous and project-based research ran in parallel.
Customers chose their own level of involvement. Whatever the tier, every insight landed in the same place: the readouts and repository that fed Product, UX, and Marketing.
4. Wire insight to decisions, and track it
- Weekly and biweekly research readouts, plus highlight reels and synthesized insights
- Research built into product rituals and roadmap discussions
- A shared repository in Condens, with a Slack chatbot so Product, Engineering, and UX could query research themselves. I led the tool evaluation that chose it.
- Every insight tracked through decision to outcome, which is what built credibility and adoption
Over time the model moved from reactive intake to proactive, continuous research, with the research team informing product direction rather than responding to requests.
Change management
The program needed real organizational change, and every group had a reasonable objection.
| Who | Their concern | How I addressed it |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Success | Research would disrupt relationships they had built | Built direct, personal trust; set clear engagement models and guardrails |
| Product teams | Didn't see what research was for | Showed how research complements their work rather than replacing it; delivered quick wins |
| Designers | Research would slow them down | Made insight fast and self-serve: readouts, highlight reels, and the repository chatbot |
The turning point came when three things lined up: we scaled the marketing program we had taken over, Customer Success came to trust us, and research delivered early, visible product impact. From then on, demand for research grew on its own. Teams came to us.
I created the program and carried it alone at first. Support built over time: my research and design teams, then Product, along with steady backing from my boss and her boss.
Key Artifact
Better outcomes created demand for research inside GoTo, and that demand brought more customers into the program. That's the loop that kept it running without a mandate.
Results & Impact
Business
- Retention: Insiders customers retained 30–60% better than customers outside the program, who were the large majority.
- Conversion: Admin checkout conversion rose from 9% to 22%, with Insiders research as one input.
- Product turnarounds that started with Insiders insight. Each has its own case study:
- Customer Engagement → CX: the need for omnichannel communication. CE became the foundation of Connect CX, GoTo's flagship product.
- Automotive vertical: dealerships needed industry-specific solutions, with call deflection and appointment capture as the critical use cases. GoTo Connect for Automotive, which I initiated and drove with my product partner, launched in Q3 2025 and beat its revenue goal for the year in its first quarter after launch.
- AI Receptionist & AI Agent: users didn't understand how the AI worked, and trust was the barrier. Designing for clarity and control led to the most successful launch in GoTo history, measured by speed to target: AI Receptionist launched in Q2 and hit its numbers that same quarter.
- Grasshopper: workflows were fragmented; features weren't missing. The core flows were redesigned, and Grasshopper went from keep-the-lights-on to beating its revenue and growth goals.
This is the loop in practice. One customer insight reversed a failed product's direction. The full story is in the From Failed Launch to Flagship case study.
Customers
- Alpha and beta cohorts helped shape products before release, not after.
Organization
- On GoTo's side, research went from nonexistent to a team of my own (up to four direct reports), with promotions to Staff and Senior. The program itself served all 12 researchers across three brands.
- Over nearly four years, UX moved from service function to embedded, then strategic, then business driver. Insiders was a key enabler of that shift.
- Research demand became organic: Product and Engineering came looking for insight rather than being sold it.
Reflection
What I learned
- Customer insight has to be continuous and embedded. Ad hoc research gets ignored.
- Trust, inside the company and with customers, is the foundation. Everything else depends on it.
- Early wins drive adoption faster than any mandate.
- Done right, customer insight is a business growth engine, not a UX function.
What I'd do differently
I'd take a stronger stand, sooner.
The day I started, GoTo launched Customer Engagement. It had been built in three months on the belief that "we know our customers" and "this isn't a research project." The priority was getting it to market, and it got there. Nobody got it, and nobody used it. It came close to being end-of-lifed.
Once I had a researcher and we started talking to customers, it was clear we had built the wrong thing. We had focused on sending outbound text and email campaigns. What customers needed was one omnichannel view of every contact coming in: how it was segmented, and who had access to it. Turning that around took three years, and it became the foundation of Connect CX, GoTo's flagship.
Looking back, I should have insisted on research from day one, framed as a way to move faster rather than as something that would slow anyone down. And while my first researcher and I were still building trust, I should have jumped in and done more of the research myself, right away.
The lesson cut both ways: I should have been firmer about the need for research, and more patient while building the relationships that would make it happen.
"Ren is the kind of leader who makes everyone around him better. He was the most tireless advocate for UX research, bringing his own research background to the table while creating the conditions for our team to do impactful work."
Staff UX Researcher, a direct report