← ALL CASE STUDIES

Customer voices are everything. WAVV figured out how to collect them at scale.

Today, Malia Robinson, CRO at Wave Communications, has an interview agent running at every stage of her customers' journey: one when they sign up, one when they're pending cancellation, one when they hit a "workversary." She can build a new one whenever she needs it.

It wasn't always this way. Not long ago, getting even a handful of customer interviews meant pulling her own team off their regular projects, teaching them how to interview well, and hoping customers had time in their schedule to talk. Wave was also wrestling with high churn, and Malia had a hunch about why: their content wasn't meeting customers where they actually were. She was right, and figuring out how to fix it at scale, without a massive headcount, became the turning point in Wave's marketing.

Malia's realization came into focus as she watched how easy AI had made it to churn out marketing content. "Everyone can put out tons of content. It's easier than ever to be able to pump out entire campaigns in minutes," she explains. But volume wasn't the problem Wave needed to solve, trust was. "What's going to make the difference between something that is sloppy and something that is awesome is your customer voice."

Before shifting toward customer-centric content, Wave's churn was high, and their messaging often left prospects thinking, "Okay, but how does this impact me?" or wondering whether anyone had actually succeeded using Wave's product. "It cost us a ton," Malia says. "Our churn has been really high, and when we were able to change our content to be more customer-centric, our churn was impacted in the best way possible."

Wave's old solution was to run incentive campaigns asking customers for 15-minute interviews, and it worked, to a point. But it meant Malia had to keep members of her team on standby to conduct those interviews, pulling them away from other projects. Teaching people to interview well, without interrupting, without missing the follow-up question, proved even harder. "That is a hard thing to teach at scale," she says.

Malia went into her first Proofolio demo with a real hesitation: could an AI interview agent actually preserve the human connection she valued, or would it feel hollow? To find out, she did an interview herself. The experience changed her mind.

That was exactly the feeling she wanted her own customers to walk away with.

What pushed her over the edge was realizing she could build more than one interview agent, tailoring each to a different moment in the customer relationship. Price gave her pause. "Having to dish out, like, a couple thousand dollars a month can be a little stressful," she admits, especially mid-quarter and unplanned for. But when she weighed that cost against the headcount it would take to run and process interviews at the same scale herself, the decision became, in her words, "a no-brainer."

Getting started, Malia says, "was honestly so easy." Right after signing up, Wave sent a campaign to roughly 200 of their best customers and built out their first interview agent. Interviews started coming in almost immediately, and the response rate genuinely surprised her. Because the interviews were asynchronous, customers could complete them on their own time, even in the middle of the night, without coordinating around anyone's calendar.

The reactions from her own customers stuck with her. Some got emotional mid-interview, opening up about why they were working so hard: "I'm really trying to do this for my family. I'm pushing for that." Watching customers realize the weight of their own accomplishments in real time, she says, was "really cool to be able to see."

When the finished stories came back, they sounded like her customers, not like marketing copy. Malia used them for more than publishing; she used what customers said to learn their language and understand exactly what they needed at each stage. She also began feeding the interviews into Claude through Proofolio's MCP integration to get even more use out of them.

What Malia emphasized most was the shift in how well Wave now understands its customers. Using the interviews, Wave completely rebuilt its lifecycle marketing: new customers get interview invites, experienced customers get emails built from what other customers said they needed, and everyone gets content matched to the exact challenge they're facing.

That mattered especially for a specific churn point Wave had struggled with: customers who dropped off right after their first purchase and stopped using the product as often as they'd planned. "Now we know exactly what content they need right after that first purchase to stay motivated to keep going," Malia says, "because we have those customer stories. We have evidence of people that have been able to push through the same challenges they need to push through."

Malia also describes a change in how confident she feels running Wave's marketing. "I feel really confident that our messaging is correct," she says. "I feel more confident in our authority as a guide for these customers... now when they come to us, we really know what they need." Reading the finished stories was motivating in its own right: "It makes you feel good about the work that you're doing... you're able to see the real people that you're impacting."

Asked what she'd tell herself back when marketing felt stuck, Malia didn't hesitate:

For Malia, Proofolio is what made it possible to do that well and at a high-quality level.

Collecting customer voices makes sense because Malia studied people long before she marketed to them. Her career started in anthropology: field work in Jamaica, studying the Maroons for her senior thesis, learning to observe people until their patterns made sense. Now, Proofolio runs that observation and strategic implementation of the insights for her 24/7.

On a recent LinkedIn post, she asked a question that could be Proofolio's job description: "How good are you at observing? It's worth asking yourself. It's a dying skill." Your customers carry golden nuggets of truth, wisdom, and experience, and if you only knew what they knew, you could improve everything about your product and service. Finding those nuggets at scale is the hard part. 

She's already thinking about what comes next, having built out multiple interview agents for different moments in the customer lifecycle and imagining still more. For Malia, the real win wasn't just the content Proofolio produced, it was what happens when a business finally hears its customers clearly enough to become, as she puts it, a genuine guide for their success.

Your customers already decided. Get it on the record.