How Fernweh Travel cut weekly feedback triage from 6 hours to 40 minutes
Before: Monday was spreadsheet day
Every Monday, two product managers read the previous week’s Zendesk tickets tagged “feedback”, copied them into a spreadsheet, and tried to match them against 800 rows of older requests. It took about six hours. Customers who asked for something rarely heard back.
“We had a backlog of promises nobody remembered making.”
- 1Export Zendesk tickets tagged “feedback”30 min
- 2Read and summarize each ticket2.5 h
- 3Match against 800-row spreadsheet2 h
- 4Prioritize in a meeting45 min
- 5Tell customers (rarely happened)15 min
- 1New requests arrive tagged from Zendeskauto
- 2Accept merge suggestions (M)15 min
- 3Review themes sorted by revenue15 min
- 4Move top themes to Planned10 min
- 5Requesters notified on shipauto
The switch: one afternoon
Fernweh imported the spreadsheet and two years of Zendesk tickets. Roadnote proposed 212 merges; the team accepted 188 and rejected 24. By Tuesday they had 31 themes, sorted by the bookings revenue of the accounts behind them.
After: triage is a 40-minute ritual
Now one PM clears the inbox on Monday morning. Support tags from Zendesk directly and sees status on every request they logged. When something ships, every requester hears the same day.
Where Roadnote fell short: Fernweh still exports to a spreadsheet for their quarterly board deck; custom reports are on our roadmap as “Planned”.