Customer insights repository for SumUp Invoices

At SumUp, building a strong connection with customers was becoming increasingly important as the company expanded its product portfolio and moved toward a more holistic payment ecosystem. In late 2021, I was appointed Customer Experience (CX) Manager for SumUp Invoices and tasked with setting up the CX function from the ground up. One of the first and most critical challenges I tackled was the creation of a centralized customer insights repository: A tool designed to gather, organize, and amplify the voice of the customer (VoC) across multiple teams and initiatives.

TL;DR

In 2021, SumUp launched its first Customer Experience department, starting with the Invoices and Accounting squad. I led the development of a centralized customer insights repository using Productboard, integrating customer feedback from surveys, customer support, research, and product teams. Within two months, we had a live, taxonomy-driven repository that informed product decisions, influenced marketing campaigns, and helped promote the expansion of CX practices across other departments at SumUp.

Context

SumUp was undergoing a significant transition in the second half of 2021, aiming to evolve from a single-product company to a diverse ecosystem of financial tools tailored to small business needs. It had begun promoting and developing complementary solutions like Invoicing, Online Store, and even a Banking product, going beyond its core offering of payment terminals. With this growth came the necessity to deeply understand customer behaviors, pain points, and expectations. The Invoicing and Accounting squad became the pilot team for embedding Customer Experience practices. I was appointed as CX Manager to lead this effort and act as an ambassador to promote customer-centricity across other teams.

At the time, customer feedback was being collected inconsistently across multiple channels—support tickets, surveys, research sessions, and informal product conversations. There was no unified system for storing or analyzing this information. As a result, customer needs were often underrepresented in strategic planning and product discussions. Creating a single, scalable, and structured repository of insights became a critical first step.

Approach

Alongside a CX Specialist, I initiated a discovery phase to identify existing feedback sources and understand team requirements. We explored different tools and ultimately chose to repurpose Productboard, a product management platform already in limited use at SumUp, as our repository base.

With a tool to unify the data from all relevant sources and transform customer feedback in customer insights we needed to integrate the data. The next step was to partner with Salesforce engineers, CRM leads, and product teams to build custom integrations that could automatically import customer data from various sources, isurveys, support interactions, research sessions, product feature requests, and historical records. This allowed us to go back years and retrieve valuable legacy insights.

Once the technical foundation was in place, we dedicated a three-week sprint exclusively to reading, tagging, and categorizing years of customer feedback using a “Jobs-to-be-Done” framework. This helped standardize language across teams and ensure feedback was actionable and connected to real user goals. We also defined workflows and training materials for ongoing use and upkeep.

Output

In under two months, we launched a fully operational, cross-functional feedback repository. The system consolidated real-time and historical insights from multiple sources, all classified under a unified taxonomy. It allowed stakeholders to search and segment feedback by topic, feature, or job-to-be-done, making it significantly easier to identify recurring pain points and opportunities.

The repository quickly became a core tool for monthly reporting, product planning, and prioritization discussions. It also served as a central hub for sharing insights with marketing, research, and leadership teams—bridging communication gaps between departments and aligning everyone around the customer experience.

Outcomes

The result was a robust, searchable, and scalable feedback repository that transformed the way the Invoices team worked. It allowed us to surface critical user problems, measure the impact of product changes, and easily report insights in monthly updates to leadership, product, and marketing.

Thanks to the repository, customer insight became a consistent input in product planning, resulting in more user-informed features and more resonant marketing campaigns. The success of the initiative significantly raised the profile of the CX function within SumUp, and the model was later adopted by other departments, laying the foundation for a company-wide approach to customer-centricity.

This project proved that CX isn’t just about listening; it’s about structuring insight in a way that empowers teams to act.