Table of Contents
Time between Unwrap implementation and high-quality insight delivery.
Time saved per week across the VoC team.
Accuracy of Unwrap’s feedback categorization.
Praktika, an AI-powered language learning app, knows the value of listening to their customers. But as a young, fast-scaling startup, they opted to initially “make do” with an internally-built voice of the customer (VoC) tool, which was a combination of a built-in-house feedback AI agent with manual feedback curation.
As feedback volume surged and company growth accelerated at an almost viral clip, the limits of a homegrown approach became impossible to ignore. The goal was to spot recurring themes quickly enough to inform product decisions, but the built-in-house tool had a delay of several days which was detrimental to the business and its customer obsession.
The VoC team at Praktika had two paths in front of it: invest more resources to improve the internal solution or invest in a customer intelligence platform that was purpose-built to help teams analyze feedback at scale. Once they saw Unwrap could deliver higher-quality insights faster, and with lower total effort, the decision was easy.
It was time to buy.
The starting point: A scrappy, “this will do” build
Beatrice Aliprandi, Chief of Staff at Praktika explained what the early version of their VoC insights tool looked like.
“Because we’re a very young but fast-scaling startup, our first attempt at a VoC insights tool was quite comprehensive but mostly manual and very laborious to maintain,” she said.
One person collected feedback from app store reviews and community channels and ran it through an AI agent to categorize it into several types of feedback and assign it to the appropriate product team, one that took 3-4 months of tuning before it started producing satisfactory results.
The aim was simple: catch recurring themes fast enough to inform the next round of product choices. They “prioritized speed over structure,” accepted some incompleteness, and were able to move quickly.
That approach worked until the product took off. As their user base expanded, the team’s drive for closing the gap between feedback and action collided with the realities of limited tool functionality and rising feedback volume.
“As a product, we live and die by how well we understand our users. We’re obsessive about closing the loop between feedback and action. When something happens, we need to know in a matter of hours, not days. The old process was not aligned with that,” shared Adam Turaev, Co-founder and CEO of Praktika.
The cost of building internally
Viral growth in 2024 brought a surge of feedback that one person and an LLM could no longer keep up with. The team had one, full-time employee dedicated solely to customer feedback: someone who was interviewing users, categorizing feedback into taxonomy groups, in addition to helping the customer support team to respond and handle support cases.
That included routing insights to different teams and compiling reports. Others pitched in to cross-check categories and review the AI Agent at regular intervals, but the ceiling on quality became clear.
“At its peak, dozens of hours per week—including weekends—were spent on repetitive, manual work that wasn’t scalable,” said Aliprandi.
The tradeoffs included:
- Maxed-out bandwidth: Valuable time that could’ve been spent on deeper analysis, strategy, or proactive customer engagement was eaten up by sorting and tagging.
- Slower feedback loops: Manual categorization created delays between when feedback was received and when product teams could act on it.
- Sacrifices in accuracy: Even the most attentive human can’t sustain high levels of accuracy when processing thousands of feedback entries. That gap meant they were likely missing important nuances or mis-prioritizing some insights.
The opportunity cost: push the product forward or build what you can buy?
What if you’re an enterprise organization with the resources to build almost anything? The question then becomes whether or not you should.
When large teams take on the development of customer-intelligence tooling, they inherit a second product to design, ship, and maintain. That means AI model updates, taxonomy governance, UI polish, security reviews, and integration work that never really ends. None of that work differentiates you in the market, yet it competes for attention from your best talent.
But, directing those same engineers or data scientists toward the core product compounds. If internal teams are focused on pushing the product forward, then features can reach customers sooner. Onboarding and conversions can improve. Retention programs can provide more value. Instead of chasing unrealistic parity with a purpose-built tool, your teams can direct their energy toward decisions that move revenue and product experience in a positive, meaningful direction.
Buying a purpose-built platform opened up a whole new world
The process of evaluating customer intelligence platforms made the tradeoffs concrete for Praktika. And Unwrap was a standout among those in consideration.
“Unwrap consistently categorized feedback into the right taxonomy groups with ~97–98% accuracy, which is way beyond what manual review or a basic internal tool could achieve,” Aliprandi explained.
Accuracy alone would have been a win, but speed was the real unlock. Real-time alerts flagged changes in customer feedback as they happened, so the path from signal to action shortened dramatically.
“One of the most valuable features for us is Unwrap’s ability to flag unusual spikes or shifts in feedback categories immediately. That level of speed is something we couldn’t replicate internally, and it meant we could make moving from insight to action within hours a reality.”
Coverage expanded too. The internal tool had focused on app stores and direct community feedback. With Unwrap, they pulled in data from Reddit, Discord, app stores, and even structured inputs like Google Sheets (via Zapier) giving Praktika a far more complete picture of the voice of the customer. And the effect on the team’s day-to-day work was noticeable.
“It took Unwrap two weeks to get up to speed and start delivering valuable insights. The team could shift its focus away from combing through raw feedback and toward interpreting insights, shaping product priorities, and acting decisively based on real-time trends,” said Aliprandi.
Tangible ROI and a safeguard of business revenue
All in all, the decision to buy Unwrap returned time back to the VoC and reduced business risk. Two major wins.
“Unwrap gave our team a combined 30 hours back per week (across two employees), at least, and saved countless hours that would’ve been spent on fine tuning the internal build,” said Aliprandi.
Plus, faster detection helps protect company revenue.
“If a spike in customer feedback goes unnoticed, that could mean lower conversion rates of trial subscriptions or higher churn rates, which even for a few hours, translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars of missed revenue,” shared Aliprandi.
Customer feedback isn’t on Praktika’s nice-to-have list. Customer feedback is mission-critical. They treat every piece of feedback as an opportunity to improve the experience and deepen customer engagement.
“Unwrap allows us to actually be as customer obsessed as we are.”
