How Gousto boost sign-up conversion with AI-moderated research

‍The challenge: Getting misleading feedback from traditional user testing

Gousto's product teams have two main goals:

Acquiring new customers to sustain the company's growth.
Retaining existing customers by providing experiences they love.

Initially, they relied on manual methods to gather customer feedback. They collaborated with marketing and customer support to send out email surveys. However, this approach was time-consuming, didn't scale well, and resulted in low response rates.

Seeking better insights, they turned to research panels and recruitment agencies. But this introduced new problems:

Non-representative participants: The people recruited weren't actual Gousto users, so their feedback didn't accurately reflect the target audience.
Professional testers: Participants were often too experienced in giving feedback, which led to unrealistic responses.
Long turnaround times: It could take up to 14 days to recruit participants and conduct interviews, slowing down the decision-making process.

As Sophie Bond, a product designer focused on acquisition experiments at Gousto, explained, they often felt unsure if they were building the right things because they lacked clarity on where users were experiencing problems.

Lacking visibility over the user experience

Without real insights from actual users, Gousto struggled to understand the true needs and pain points of their customers. This lack of visibility meant they sometimes built features or ran experiments that didn't move the needle on their acquisition and retention goals. They were essentially flying blind, which is a common challenge when feedback doesn't come directly from your user base.

The solution: Continuous product discovery with Wondering

Gousto decided to overhaul their approach by integrating Wondering's AI-powered user insights platform into their product development lifecycle. This shift enabled them to:

Collect in-product user insights: By embedding studies directly within their website, they could gather feedback from real users as they interacted with the product.
Conduct AI-moderated user interviews: They started having in-depth conversations with customers, with the first responses arriving as quickly as 5 minutes after launching a study.
Use targeted segmentation: They could prompt specific user segments across the sign-up funnel and checkout process, ensuring the feedback was relevant and actionable.

This new approach meant they no longer had to rely on external panels or agencies. Instead, they could hear directly from their own customers, making it easier to identify real issues and opportunities.

The impact: Increasing sign-up conversion rate by 1%

By bringing the voice of real customers into every product decision, Gousto saw immediate benefits. Here are some of the key impacts:

Higher response rates: In some key areas of their product journey, they achieved response rates as high as 70%.
Faster time-to-insight: With responses coming in within minutes, they could accelerate their product development cycles.
Improved product metrics: In one instance, Sophie Bond's team increased the website conversion rate by 1% through a single product experiment. This experiment was ideated and prioritized based on feedback collected directly from in-product studies conducted through Wondering.

These improvements weren't just about numbers; they represented a better understanding of their customers' needs, preferences, and pain points. This deeper insight allowed them to optimize onboarding experiences, identify new product opportunities, and prioritize their roadmap more effectively.

Key takeaways for your research practice

Gousto's experience offers several lessons that you can apply to your own user research efforts:

Gather feedback from real users within your product
In-context user research methods like in-product surveys and AI-moderated interviews allow you to collect feedback from users as they interact with your product. This ensures the insights are timely, relevant, and reflective of actual user experiences.
Reduce time-to-insight to accelerate decision-making
By leveraging tools that provide rapid feedback, you can shorten the time between identifying an issue and implementing a solution. Gousto reduced their lead time from 14 days to just 5 minutes for receiving initial responses, significantly speeding up their ability to act on insights.
Target specific user segments for more relevant insights
Use built-in targeting and segmentation to focus on the users who are most relevant to your research objectives. This increases the likelihood of receiving actionable feedback that can drive meaningful improvements.
Integrate continuous discovery into your product lifecycle
Make user research an ongoing part of your process rather than a one-off activity. Continuous discovery helps you stay aligned with your users' evolving needs and can lead to ongoing improvements in your product.
Leverage AI to scale your research efforts
AI-powered tools can help you manage larger volumes of feedback and conduct more in-depth analyses without proportionally increasing the workload. This allows you to scale your research efforts efficiently.

Bring the voice of real customers into your product decisions

Gousto's journey underscores the importance of connecting directly with your users to inform product decisions. By shifting to a model of continuous, in-product user research, they were able to identify and address onboarding friction that was hindering their sign-up conversions.

For product teams looking to improve their own metrics, consider adopting similar strategies:

Use in-context research methods to collect timely and relevant feedback.
Reduce reliance on external panels that may not represent your user base.
Act quickly on insights to keep up with user needs and market changes.

By embedding user research into every stage of your product development, you can make more informed decisions, build features that truly resonate with your customers, and ultimately drive revenue growth and retention.

Author

Axel Thomson

Founder

Author

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Build better product experiences with AI-first user research