Styleseat is an online booking and payment platform used by beauty and wellness professionals and their clients around the United States. These professionals can showcase their work, connect with new and existing clients, and build their business. On the client-side, they can discover new services and providers, book appointments online, and get inspired. Since launching in 2011, StyleSeat has powered 120 million appointments worth $6.5B.

The company is keenly aware of the impact that product quality has on retention, brand equity, and revenue. It’s why StyleSeat is laser-focused on achieving the highest levels of user satisfaction and driving positive change across product delivery.

The Situation: Teams working in silos, data getting lost

With a consistent 3.5 star rating from their professionals and clients, StyleSeat knew their users were satisfied but not experiencing the wow factor they wanted to deliver. The company’s goal was to elevate the product to a level that could earn true user delight and retention. The problem was that the engineering team was challenged with getting the critical user feedback data they needed to drive feature prioritization and product quality.

With feedback coming from multiple sources: App Store reviews, Play Store reviews, Zendesk support tickets and more - key feedback data was getting lost and there was no single source of truth or ownership of the data. There were too many tools holding data, and too many departments - support, QA, product, engineering - working in silos and not toward a common goal.

What evolved is what Greg Burch, VP of Engineering at StyleSeat, referred to as papercut syndrome. Teams were fixing bugs, but not driving the next big feature. StyleSeat set out to find and develop the enhancements that could earn the five stars rating they knew was possible.

The Solution: Automated user feedback platform

StyleSeat chose the automated user feedback platform from unitQ that could deliver the critical feedback data and internal team focus they hadn’t had before. The powerful solution, unitQ Monitor, allows them to experiment with new features and easily measure outcomes with real-time user feedback and analysis. For example, when StyleSeat started working on the appointment power-booking feature, they could launch it and immediately hunt for all users talking about it. They are able to drill down to find any users having problems with booking appointments and why, from both the booker and professional taking the appointment. This type of real-time feedback has proved invaluable for StyleSeat.

Product quality as the single source of truth

The unitQ score has become a company-wide performance metric, with teams now aligned on quality enterprise-wide and working toward a common goal and OKRs. In addition, now that StyleSeat maintains all the user feedback in a centralized report, teams get the whole picture when it comes to product issues and roadmaps. They gain the insights they need to prioritize features and bugs and can build the solution that keeps their professionals and clients happy and retained.

Actionable user feedback

StyleSeat is also using unitQ Monitor to help teams find and fix product issues as they're being reported, by piping in user feedback from any support ticketing channel, review site, or language – all in real-time. The automatic tagging and reporting features provide a rich context to ensure accuracy and the ability to reproduce. It brings granularity to the data to produce crisp signals, making bugs easier to tackle and prioritize.

The Results: Teams empowered, driving toward a common goal

The StyleSeat team is now working together smarter and faster, focused on a common goal of building and delivering a great product for their professionals and clients. unitQ has empowered their employees and teams to use product quality metrics as a common language and break through the noise once hindering their jobs. It brings a sense of unity and collaboration that previously didn’t exist.

The Numbers

StyleSeat found the wow factor, and users noticed the improvements as well - raising their App Store ratings from 3.5 to 4.9 and Play Store ratings from 3.5 to 4.6. In just 4 months, their unitQ Score - the Quality Metric, improved by 18%, from 77 up to 91. This combination of team empowerment, quantified insights, and noise reduction makes unitQ a key driver in user satisfaction.