About the Customer
Wayfair (NYSE: W) is one of the world’s largest online destinations for home goods, offering millions of products from thousands of suppliers. Guided by the mission to “make it easy to create a home that’s just right for you,” Wayfair builds its success on making it seamless for customers to discover, evaluate, and purchase the perfect products for their homes.
The Challenge
As technology accelerates and consumer expectations shift faster than ever, Wayfair recognized that staying ahead meant continually adapting to what customers need and value. To keep delivering exceptional experiences, the company needed to listen, learn, and respond to shoppers at the same pace their expectations evolved.
Traditional research methods couldn’t keep up with the scale and speed required. They were also time-consuming to maintain critical recurring—yet often repetitive—research motions that the business depended on. Rather than simply working harder under mounting pressure, the research team set out to do more with less: streamlining manual processes and enabling impactful research at scale for both researchers and non-researchers. This shift made it possible for insights to flow quickly across the funnel, guiding smarter product decisions without compromising depth or quality.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Wayfair turned to Dialogue, an AI-powered research platform that helps teams listen to customers at scale.
With Dialogue, Wayfair’s research team could conduct in-depth, AI-moderated customer interviews and analyze results in a fraction of the usual time. What once took weeks could now be done in days or less—allowing the team to keep pace with rapid experimentation across product and design initiatives.
This new approach enabled Wayfair to:
- Scale customer listening to support more initiatives without compromising quality
- Accelerate feedback loops with timely insights that informed both quick tests and long-term strategy
- Uncover richer, actionable insights by engaging directly with shoppers throughout their journey
By partnering with Dialogue, Wayfair turned customer research into a continuous, fast-moving feedback engine—keeping product decisions grounded in real customer needs while adapting to ever-evolving expectations.
Three Ways Wayfair Uses Dialogue
1. Optimizing Value Propositions Across the Funnel
Wayfair set out to identify which product attributes and value propositions—such as “Top Rated,” “Free 2-Day Delivery,” and “Low Returns”—most influence shoppers’ decisions at different stages of the funnel.
Using Dialogue, Wayfair conducted dozens of in-depth, AI-moderated shopper interviews and synthesized results in less than two days. The study surfaced three key dimensions of shopper behavior:
- Noticeability & Placement – How shoppers notice and respond to signals across the site
- Cognitive Load – The impact of competing or excessive signals on shopper confidence and decision-making
- Stage-Specific Relevance – Which value propositions resonate most at upper-, mid-, and lower-funnel stages
These insights guided long-term product strategy while driving immediate design adjustments to enhance the shopping experience.
Dialogue has been a driving force in helping our team scale validation research and quickly uncover insights that drive real impact.
— Umang Bhojani, User Researcher, Wayfair
2. Validating New Wayfair Delivery Options
Wayfair was preparing to launch new delivery options and needed rapid feedback to ensure shoppers clearly understood the service, pricing, and value.
Using Dialogue’s AI-moderated studies and automated synthesis, the team ran validation research with 20 participants—double their typical sample size—while surfacing insights in 36 hours.
Dialogue’s automated reporting saved the team an estimated 7 hours of researcher time per study—time otherwise spent reviewing recordings and manually synthesizing findings. By accelerating analysis and expanding participation, the team could focus on strategic decisions well before launch.
Dialogue enabled us to validate new delivery options rapidly—expanding participation, accelerating synthesis, and freeing time for the cross-functional team. That shift let us focus on copy, pricing, and service differentiation ahead of launch.
— Derek Hevel, Lead User Researcher, Wayfair
3. Scaling the “Weekly Interviews” Program
Wayfair runs a long-standing research initiative called “Weekly Interviews,” a Voice of the Customer program designed to keep the organization closely connected to its users. This ongoing series helps teams stay informed about customer needs, build empathy, track longitudinal changes over time, and gather actionable feedback that informs decisions across product, design, and strategy.
The program is highly valuable, but managing it has become repetitive and time-intensive. As popularity grew and weekly interviews increased, maintaining consistency demanded substantial manual effort from the research team.
Wayfair began leveraging Dialogue to start automating an established part of the Weekly Interviews program called the “Exploratory” interview stream, which delivers outputs such as shopping and Wayfair usage behavioral trends, along with supporting video clips and verbatims.
Looking ahead, the team is excited to expand the use of Dialogue into more series within the Weekly Interviews Voice of the Customer program to scale its reach and free up time to focus on new, more strategic initiatives.
I’m excited by the pace of innovation we’re seeing from Dialogue and thrilled to see it become more deeply embedded in Wayfair’s research operations. As we scale its use across programs like Weekly Interviews, we’re empowering the entire organization to stay closer to our customers and make more customer-centric decisions every day.
— Bernard Homicile, Research Operations, Wayfair