LISTEN CASE STUDY
How Microsoft uses Listen Labs to better understand their customers
Expand understanding
Romani Patel is a Senior Research Manager at Microsoft, where she leads AI strategy for customer research and oversees Microsoft’s in-house Hyper-Targeted Research. With a background in engineering and an MBA, her curiosity about human behavior is what ultimately led her into research.
“I enjoy uncovering what motivates people, why they make certain decisions,” she said, “and how the products or the experiences make users feel.”
Microsoft’s mission to empower every person to achieve more, and with the company’s large reach they have the opportunity to make a global impact. But with that reach comes a challenge: how to effectively engage a global audience in research and insights to understand and improve their experiences?
That’s where Listen Labs comes in.
Faster and more cost-effective research
Traditional customer research at a company like Microsoft can be resource-intensive. “It takes 4 to 6 weeks to get to insights,” Romani said. “By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it.”
With Listen, that changed. Romani said she no longer had to wait for weeks or months to get insights. Now she can get them in days. In many cases, within hours.
And because Listen enables research at scale, Microsoft has been able to expand its research efforts in a way that was previously out of reach.
“If I want to do 100 interviews with customers, I’m able to do it at scale,” Romani said. “I can reach out to hundreds of users at one third of the cost.”
Global storytelling
Uncovering the “why” at scale
It can be easy for market research to lean heavily on quantitative data — uncovering what customers are doing, but not always why. That’s because that qualitative layer requires one-on-one interviews or focus groups that can be slow and expensive to run. Microsoft was facing a similar challenge, but with Listen Romani can now get insight into the why at a larger scale.
Beyond just access, the platform offers a new level of choice for users to share stories in their own words in whatever medium feels most comfortable for them.
“I am not only able to scale the why, but also enable inclusivity,” Romani said. “Our customers are able to answer in a mode of their choice — whether it's through a video, whether it's through text, whether it's through voice — in a language of their choice. And at a time that works for them, unlike the traditional qualitative research where people are boxed in in a certain time and the date.”
That kind of inclusivity has made a big difference.
Romani and her team recently used Listen Labs for a high-visibility project: collecting global customer stories for Microsoft’s 50th anniversary.
“We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward,” she said, “and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day.”
Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks. But Listen gave them the tools to collect quality responses much faster. Even better, as users submitted their videos the AI platform took some of those videos and put a highlight reel together in real time.
“Our leadership team was very thrilled at both the speed and the scale that Listen enabled,” Romani said.
Bringing joy back to research
As much as Listen has transformed what Microsoft is able to do, Romani says it has also changed how it feels to engage in the work.
“Research can be a lot of manual work.” she said, “I feel like Listen lets me focus more of my time on strategic work, talking to the customers. The bonus is it brings a little bit of the fun and joy back to my work.”
Listen helps Romani and her team move faster and more meaningfully. By connecting with users, they can stay close to the human stories, and get to shape better experiences for the Microsoft users excited to achieve more.