Voice of Customer | UX Manager

Voice of Customer Initiative: Building a Culture of Customer-Centered Design

In my role as UX Manager at Backcountry, I created and now lead the Voice of Customer (VoC) Initiative across all Backcountry sites. The goal: to embed customer insights into every stage of product development and empower teams across the company to design with empathy, clarity, and confidence.

Building the Foundation

I launched the initiative by setting up the company’s first UX Lab for user testing, creating a central hub for qualitative and quantitative research. From there, I built a robust program that included:

◆ Training the UX team on user testing best practices.

◆ Managing the Feedback Tab and other on-site surveys to filter and prioritize customer input.

◆ Generating user testing lists of Backcountry customers and writing/managing surveys.

◆ Creating findings presentations to highlight testing insights and opportunities.

◆Hosting Mouseflow Viewing Parties where cross-functional teams watched real user session recordings together to spot pain points and co-create solutions.

As a result, the UX team ran 15–20 tests per month, continuously feeding insights into the product roadmap.

Evangelizing Insights Across the Org

Beyond building the lab and processes, I took the learnings company-wide. I led roadshows across departments, presenting findings to Product, Marketing, Merchandising, and Engineering. Each session highlighted team-specific opportunities for growth, sparking conversations around how every function could better serve the customer.

To ensure visibility at the leadership level, I also launched a monthly Tech Newsletter, providing executives with a clear, digestible view of what Product and Engineering had shipped and what was in progress.

Results & Impact

The Voice of Customer Initiative transformed the way Backcountry thinks about experience design. Customer insights became not just a UX deliverable, but a shared language across the company, driving alignment, uncovering hidden opportunities, and creating a more seamless customer experience on site.

The Voice of Customer Initiative had a measurable impact across the organization:

+18% increase in test velocity compared to baseline (averaging 15–20 structured tests per month).

+12% improvement in task success rates on key user flows after surfacing and resolving recurring pain points.

20% faster design-to-development cycles thanks to earlier alignment on customer needs.

Broader organizational buy-in: more than 200 employees attended VoC roadshows or Mouseflow viewing parties in the first year.

Executive engagement: Tech Newsletter readership consistently exceeded 75% of senior leadership.

The VoC initiative transformed customer research from a UX deliverable into a company-wide practice, ensuring that every team had the tools and insights to design with the customer in mind.