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Faster root cause investigation of support tickets.
Drop in launch day ticket spikes relative to Gen4, when controlled for # of members.
Time saved returning ticket volumes to baseline compared to Gen4.
WHOOP 5.0 was the company’s most ambitious launch yet, and it was more than a hardware upgrade. The new generation represented a strategic shift: expanding to include more than insights about athletic performance and looking to longevity and wellness.
As Nate Giacalone, VP of Product, Growth at WHOOP, explained:
“This launch was oriented around educating our members on how the things they're doing impact their long-term health, not just focusing on how it impacts your next day of training. We launched two new product wearables, alongside software updates that help members better understand their healthspan.”
The stakes were high. WHOOP had learned valuable lessons from its WHOOP 4.0 launch in 2021, when overwhelming demand caused meaningful backlogs and a flood of customer support tickets. For 5.0, avoiding those pitfalls required not only supply chain improvements but also a smarter way to respond to—and ideally prevent—support issues.
That’s where Unwrap came in.
The challenge: The need for proactive visibility
WHOOP knew launch day would bring a massive spike in activity. “We saw about a 15X week-over-week increase in support contacts when we launched WHOOP 4.0.”
According to Giacalone, the biggest fear was not supply, but member experience:
“Our team usually focuses on moving engagement or acquisition in a positive direction. When planning for WHOOP 5.0, we had a specific business metric focused on reduction—reducing the human hours assigned to and responding to member tickets.”
The WHOOP team wanted to go beyond ticket automation, resolving inbound support tickets quickly. Instead, they needed to prevent issues from becoming tickets at all.
“There will always be support tickets. But we’d rather have members have the ability to self-serve and easily find the information they need, because that frees us up to work on more complex member issues.”
But the team’s existing system for categorizing support data wasn’t designed for this kind of proactive insight. Tickets were forced into rigid “predetermined buckets,” leaving blind spots. What if multiple, separate issues were grouped under the same category? What if a new issue didn’t fit any category at all?
This lack of granularity meant teams could only see problems after days of manual review. Going into the WHOOP 5.0 launch, that wasn’t good enough.
Deploying Unwrap at launch: The ultimate litmus test
Just before launch, WHOOP began trialing Unwrap, an AI-powered customer intelligence platform, as a way to address these challenges.
According to Giacalone:
“We really wanted to use Unwrap to figure out: is there a better way for us to diagnose issues as they come in, figure out trends, and then get company visibility on those items. We wanted to analyze the launch and member sentiment—and then for any issues, know what we need to do to fix them, and how to do so as fast as possible.”
Real-time alerts: Catching the unknown unknowns
The most striking impact came from real-time alerts. One tangible example: during launch, the Product Growth team was alerted to a spike in support tickets from certain countries where devices were getting stuck in customs.
“Before, that might have taken a week to spot as a problem. But with Unwrap’s real-time alerts, we saw that support tickets around customs issues increased. We were able to immediately flag that to our regulatory and operations teams, who were able to get those devices through for members,” shares Giacalone.
“That was a lightbulb moment of, ‘Wow, Unwrap is so helpful.”
By surfacing previously invisible problems, Unwrap enabled WHOOP to resolve issues before they ballooned—turning potential misses into minor blips.
Widespread adoption across WHOOP
What began as a trial for the Growth Product team quickly spread throughout the WHOOP organization.
“It’s kind of insane how virally this product spread within our company. People would share images internally of the alerts they were getting, or images of the dashboard—making those who saw them eager to get access,” shares Giacalone.
“I still get two or more requests every day from people who want to join Unwrap, and we’re months past launch.”
Teams from operations, membership services, core product, hardware, and engineering all adopted the tool. Engineering leaders even built their own dashboards to monitor features like log-in flows.
Unwrap’s appeal came down to accessibility:
“People really love Unwrap’s data visualizations, because more than anything else, they appreciate getting data that used to be inaccessible in an accessible way.”
Looking ahead: Driving ongoing product growth
After the successful launch, WHOOP continues to use Unwrap, not just for firefighting, but also for product development and prioritization.
Onboarding improvements
WHOOP formed a task force to improve onboarding success rates.
By specifically analyzing new member support tickets, Unwrap surfaced issues like charging confusion and feature misunderstandings. This helped teams build clear business cases for fixes.
Merging qualitative and quantitative data
Previously, WHOOP’s bi-monthly data sessions relied heavily on quantitative metrics. Now, Unwrap ensures qualitative insights are part of the conversation.
“We found that the best way to move certain business metrics related to product, and this is probably obvious, is by actually solving a user problem. Unwrap does a great job of highlighting what the user problems are—ones that wouldn't have been obvious from qualitative data.”
What’s next up for WHOOP
WHOOP continues to expand beyond wearables, with its upcoming Advanced Labs initiative that merges biometric and biomarker data. With Unwrap embedded in its workflows, WHOOP is better equipped than ever to deliver industry-leading innovation while keeping the member experience seamless.
“We’re a very data-driven company, and Unwrap helps bring more data to the surface for all teams.”
