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In this edition of The Founder Loop, we talk with Ryan about what real return on investment looks like when it comes to a customer intelligence platform like Unwrap. Yes, there are the headline metrics: cost savings, churn reduction, and customer-led growth. But there are also the quieter, compounding wins—like faster decision-making, alignment across teams, and insights that reshape roadmaps.
This conversation explores both the macro and micro ROI metrics, and why the value of Unwrap can show up in places teams don’t expect.
What are the key pillars of ROI for Unwrap customers?
Ryan Millner: “One is dollar-focused and the other is time-focused. Under the dollar-orientated pillar, increasing retention, reducing churn, and reducing support interactions are straightforward measurements.
Customers are able to identify the top drivers of churn, resolve those issues, and increase retention. Take the reduction in churn rate by the lifetime value of customers, you’ll get a pretty clear metric for the ROI of Unwrap.
On the support side, every support case that comes into a company has some dollar amount associated with it—you have to staff either people or machines to answer that support inquiry, and you have the friction that it causes the customer up front.
Unwrap will identify the top support drivers and give you actionable insights for how to improve those. You can then improve the product, the documentation or some other CS flow, reducing overall support ticket volume and saving on costs.
As for time-saved, a lot of product teams, whether it's once a quarter, once a month, once a sprint, have people manually reviewing customer feedback. For a company with hundreds of thousands of feedback entries, that’s not a time-efficient task. With Unwrap, what normally takes 4 to 5 hours in a given exercise can be completed in just 15 to 30 minutes.”
Where have you seen Unwrap create value in places companies weren't even looking—outside of the pillars you just mentioned?
Millner: “Customers are able to actually uncover new revenue streams because of Unwrap, as we’ve seen with our customers Sunrun and Rad Power Bikes.
Sunrun is one of the leading consumer solar companies in the world—their core product is installing and maintaining solar panels on peoples’ homes. They also offer product add-ons, like additional battery packs and energy storage equipment, some of which came about because of discoveries made in Unwrap.
They found all customers who had requested more energy storage capabilities, handed that information to their sales team, and opened up a new revenue stream.
Rad Power Bikes, the premier manufacturer of e-bikes, discovered something similar. They saw an Unwrap insight around increased contact rates about spare bike parts. By making those spare parts easier to purchase online, their contact rate dropped and their spare parts revenue grew."
What are some of the downstream effects of having better customer intelligence? How does it influence decision making across teams?
Millner: “To build the best products, you have to know your customer really well. In my experience as a product leader at Amazon, and I think for a lot of others in the industry, you just don't understand your customers as well as you'd like to.
Because of that, when it comes time to build products, you rely on intuition—maybe skim Reddit or Twitter. But in reality, you’re making product decisions without the complete picture.
By having a much more comprehensive understanding of what your customers love and don't love, why they're churning, why they're upselling—you're able to then use your limited resources to build what’s actually most important to the customer. And when that happens, your product evolves quicker and you're able to move the KPIs your team really cares about.
This influences decision making across an organization because if you think about all the teams that care about customer feedback, you’ll find it's most teams in a company. The product team, the engineering team, the support team, the marketing team, the executive team, the customer success team—all of these teams want to know how customers think about the product.
With a centralized, easy-to-access platform for customer intelligence, decision making becomes way more transparent. Everyone's on the same page because they're all looking at the same data.”
You spoke earlier about churn reduction and improving customer retention. Can you share how Unwrap actually helps make those outcomes possible?
Millner: “One of the core abilities of Unwrap is that we’re able to pull in really rich customer metadata—who the customer is, when they’ve left feedback, whether they’ve churned or not (which we pull in from your CRM).
Because of that direct integration, we can understand all of the feedback that a customer has left before they churned and categorize it at really granular levels. We can show, for example, ‘Here are the top 5 patterns from customers that have churned.’
That gives you a powerful signal into figuring out what the friction points were that led them to leaving. Was it cost related? Was it usability related? Was it security? Was it new features that weren't built? All of those questions get answered, and you can go act on building the solutions.”
Beyond the core metrics of time savings, customer-led growth, retention, what are some smaller, less flashy ROI indicators that you think are just as impactful?
Millner: “Something we've heard from customers—that we didn't initially think about, but is a great outcome—is an escalation question from a manager or from an executive.
Imagine you are a PM or CX leader and your manager or skip-level comes to you and says, ‘There's this issue that I heard about. Can you go check it out?’ It may have been an email they received, a message on LinkedIn, something they heard about that’s circulating online.
You then have the task of sizing this issue—understanding its impact, if it's growing or shrinking, and then sharing that information back with the manager. That’s time intensive—it's a distraction and you have to drop everything to solve it. With Unwrap, this is essentially a non-issue.
Let's say your manager comes to you and asks, ‘I think people are having a hard time resetting their password. Can you confirm that?’ If you use Unwrap, you can log in, navigate to the Group already built around that issue, copy the Group link, and send it to your manager with a quick explanation.
From that link, they're able to see:
- Exactly how many people have experienced this issue.
- A time series to show if it’s growing or shrinking.
- And a summary, explaining exactly what's going on and if it's resolved or not.
That turns a possible multiple-hour journey into a 15 minute exercise, and the output of that exercise is more valuable.”
For a buyer trying to justify the investment internally, what's the strongest case they can make for Unwrap?
Millner: “It’s team dependent. If you are a product manager and you're bringing this to your CPO, the value is going to be realized in our platform's ability to increase retention or reduce churn.
I talked a bit about how to do that, but by identifying the top drivers of churn, reducing churn by 10-20%, and multiplying that by the lifetime value of the customer, you’re going to see meaningful ROI.
If you are a CX leader and you’re presenting Unwrap to your manager, the main ROI metrics is reducing support interactions—identifying what's driving support cases and how you can improve the product to eliminate those top drivers.
A key callout there is elimination—because when it comes to reducing support interactions, there are two approaches.
One approach (which is how a lot of companies address this problem) is to automate the resolution—instead of having a human answer the support ticket, you have a bot answer it. The problem with this approach is that the customer experience remains unchanged—they still encounter the friction point and have to write in about it.
Our approach is to work directly with the product and engineering teams to actually improve the product or experience, so the issue itself goes away. The ticket isn't resolved by a human, because there is no ticket in the first place. That is, I think, a much better way to solve the problem, as opposed to the automated way.”
