“Anecdote helps us replace guesswork with real data from our feedback. I can go into product meetings with clear evidence to support feedback, or share direct quotes and trends with the brand team. It brings the customer voice into our workflow in a way that's actionable and easy to scale”
Jen Barwick
Head of Customer Experience
Overview
We caught up with Jen Barwick, Head of Customer Experience at Minoan, to hear how her team uses Anecdote to bring clarity to feedback from shoppers, brand partners, and support channels - helping them continuously elevate the showroom experience.
The company
Minoan is changing the way people shop for furniture and home goods by bringing retail into real-world spaces. Instead of just browsing online or in stores, Minoan lets you discover and buy products you’ve actually used and loved during your stay, like a couch at an Airbnb or the sheets at a boutique hotel.
Behind the scenes, Minoan is a platform that makes it easy for designers, short-term rental hosts, and hospitality brands to furnish their spaces with top brands at trade pricing. It also gives guests a simple way to buy those same products directly from the space.
It’s shopping that feels more natural, more personal, and more connected to real life.
The problem
When Minoan brought on their first customer experience hire, there wasn’t a clear system in place for capturing and organizing customer feedback. The team truly cared about the customer experience, but the process for collecting insights was scattered - spread across Intercom chats, Slack threads, and spreadsheets. Valuable feedback was getting lost, and there was no central place to bring it all together.
At the time, the team didn’t have a solid way to measure real customer sentiment. They were reacting to one-off comments instead of seeing a ‘holistic picture’. While the team often had a good sense of what customers wanted and made smart, gut-driven decisions, there wasn’t always concrete data to back those choices or guide priorities.
Ultimately, it was clear there were signals in their customer feedback, but no structure to turn those signals into evidence based action and priorities.
The solution
Anecdote’s Voice of Customer platform helped Minoan move from handling feedback one case, or ticket, at a time to using up-to-date trends and themes to guide daily decisions, with a clearer, more complete view of what their customers really care about.
Anecdote gave the team one centralised place to see all their feedback, so they could clearly understand what specific customer cohorts thought about their products, branding and experience.
The result
Using Anecdote has cut the time Jen spends collecting and organizing feedback by more than 50%. What used to take hours across different tools now happens automatically. More importantly, it’s helped the team turn scattered feedback into clear, product-focused direction.
They’ve made several product changes based on early signals from Anecdote, shifting away from gut instinct and focusing on the 10% of feedback that consistently comes up over time.
With that setup, customer voices have become a real part of how decisions get made, not just in the CX team, but also the brand, product and c-suite team.
What Minoan’s team does now:
- It gave them a full Voice of Customer picture. Without that structure, they would’ve been left with a bunch of disconnected conversations, helpful on their own, but not enough to drive real strategy.
- They uncovered confusion in their checkout flow among other things, especially confusion around updating payment methods. That insight led to a full rebuild of that part of the experience - and a big drop in support tickets.
- CX uses it almost every day, but it’s also a go-to for Product, UX, Growth, and Brand Partnerships. It’s become a shared tool that helps everyone stay close to what customers are really saying.
- With a better understanding of their customers, they also use Anecdote to shape and analyze targeted outreach campaigns.
- Reviews VOC and trend reports weekly as part of their CX routine, using those insights to guide what the team focuses on internally.
What's Minoan's favorite feature?
Minoan’s favorite feature is the filter function in reports, which helps them spot specific patterns in feedback that they've segmented. For example, they used it to uncover confusion around return policies, shipping, and branding copy. It wasn’t the policies that were the problem, but how they were explained.
With Anecdote’s filters, they tracked this feedback over time and saw the same theme come up again and again. That led to clearer messaging across CX, product, and marketing.
Since then, they’ve updated help content and support flows, seen fewer questions, and created a smoother experience, all without changing the core product.
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