How Trace turned time zone challenges into an intelligence engine that never sleeps

Building a customer-centric climate tech company

In the urgent race to combat climate change, companies need more than just good intentions—they need efficient, data-driven ways to measure and reduce their carbon footprint. For Trace, a company dedicated to helping businesses reach net zero, this mission demands seamless collaboration between teams spread across four continents. Their story demonstrates how Ben Hanley is building a modern product team that leverages AI to turn global challenges into advantages.

Leading the charge in climate tech

Trace operates at the intersection of sustainability and technology, helping businesses navigate the complex journey to net zero emissions. Their platform enables companies of all sizes—from 5 to 2,000 employees—to measure emissions, comply with regulations, and engage their workforce in climate action. But with such a critical mission, they couldn’t afford to let distance and time zones slow down their product development.

“Our mission is to empower businesses to make and share progress towards Net Zero. We help businesses understand their pathway towards decarbonisation, confidently respond to mandatory reporting requirements, and engage their staff & suppliers on climate.”

— Ben Hanley, Head of Product

The challenges of global product development

Before implementing Twine, Trace faced several critical challenges in capturing insights from their expert team:

• Global communication barriers: Teams spread across the UK, South Africa, India, and Australia made it impossible to stay current with all customer conversations. With a 12-hour lag between regions, feedback would often “fester” before reaching the product team, creating bias in how problems were perceived and prioritized.
• Manual synthesis of fragmented data: The product team relied on a patchwork of generic video recording software and spreadsheets to track customer feedback. “I would try to do it once a fortnight,” Ben explains, “going through all call transcripts, trying to find common problems or themes and then pasting them into a spreadsheet and pulling together some charts.” This manual process was so time-intensive that it often only happened monthly.
• The feedback black hole: Despite having sustainability experts conducting up to eight customer calls per day, valuable insights often went uncaptured. CS and sales teams felt their input wasn’t being heard or incorporated into the product roadmap. “We were always asking ‘what are you hearing? There must be so much gold in there,’” notes Ben, but without an efficient way to capture and share insights, weeks could pass between receiving feedback and implementing solutions.
• Impact quantification: The team struggled to connect customer problems to business impact without linking customer insights to their CRM data. This made it difficult to prioritize potential solutions, especially when feedback came through informal channels.
• Bias management: Without a systematic way to collect feedback, natural cognitive biases made it hard to get an accurate picture of customer needs. Recency bias meant teams would often focus on feedback from their latest customer conversations, without being able to validate if an issue was widespread. Additionally, visibility bias led to an overemphasis on input from the most vocal stakeholders or customers, potentially missing common problems that were being expressed less forcefully but might have been more widespread across the customer base.

These challenges were particularly frustrating given the deep expertise of their customer-facing team. With staff holding masters degrees in renewable energy engineering and extensive sustainability knowledge, there was a wealth of insight going untapped simply due to process and tooling limitations.

Transforming customer intelligence with AI

When Trace implemented Twine, they discovered a way to turn their global presence into an advantage. With some team members conducting up to eight customer calls per day, they needed a solution that could work around the clock.

The platform became what Ben Hanley, Head of Product, describes as “a virtual customer insights specialist in your team, working at all hours, across every country, every day.”

The transformation centered around two powerful capabilities that changed how Trace processes and acts on customer intelligence.

Intelligent digests

The first was automated recurring Digests, which greatly simplified customer insights flow through the organization.

Rather than relying on manual synthesis and sharing, Twine automatically identifies themes in customer conversations and broadcasts them directly to Slack, ensuring every team member—from engineering to operations—stays connected to customer voices. This automated theming proves particularly valuable when patterns emerge; as soon as two or three customers mention the same challenge, the system flags it for immediate attention.

For the product team, this means no more hunting through disparate systems to research customer needs. Instead, they can instantly access every relevant customer conversation about a particular problem space, hearing directly how customers articulate their challenges.

CRM data for the product team

Equally transformative was the strategic integration with Hubspot, which added crucial business context to every piece of customer feedback. This integration enables Trace to segment and analyze feedback through the lens of different personas and deal sizes, helping the product team make more informed prioritization decisions. Sales roadblocks can now be evaluated not just by frequency, but by their impact on potential revenue, with the system automatically surfacing obstacles that are affecting high-value prospects. This business intelligence layer helps ensure that product investments align with market opportunities, while automated tracking of feedback’s impact on revenue provides clear validation of product decisions.

The result is a system that doesn’t just collect feedback, but actively helps Trace understand where to focus their limited resources for maximum impact on both customer success and business growth.

Results: Accelerating the path to Net Zero

The implementation of Twine has quickly transformed how Trace approaches product development and customer feedback, accelerating their mission to help businesses reach net zero. The impact has been immediately apparent in their day-to-day operations, where the time required to share and review customer feedback has dramatically decreased.

“It’s 10 times quicker to share and review customer feedback,” notes the team, pointing to how customer insights now flow naturally into Slack where teams already collaborate. This is particularly impactful given the volume of customer interactions—some team members conduct up to eight customer calls per day.

Perhaps more significantly, Twine has democratized customer insights across the organization.

“Customer feedback isn’t held by one team anymore, it’s shared across the entire business so each and every team can put customers at the heart of every decision they’re making.”

This shift has created a more inclusive and customer-centric culture, where insights from customers in different time zones and regions are now equally visible and actionable. The impact is especially evident in how teams collaborate across regions—when a team member in Australia shares an insight, colleagues in the UK often chime in with similar feedback they’re hearing from their accounting partners, leading to rich discussions about how to solve problems for different customer segments. These conversations often spawn 20-message Slack threads where teams collectively build on each other’s insights, all without requiring product team intervention.

The results extend beyond mere efficiency gains. Team morale has notably improved as positive feedback is now regularly surfaced alongside problem reports. Weekly highlights of customer success stories help everyone understand the impact their work is having on customers and their broader mission to combat climate change. The customer-facing teams are now more proactive about sharing insights and suggesting solutions.

As Ben describes it:

“Twine has been a game-changer. Customer insights & roadblocks are now automatically shared across the business every single week. It’s now easier & quicker to identify & prioritize customer problems. I also love seeing all the positive customer feedback come in each week - the team works so hard, and it’s great to see their work being recognized with customer love.”

This transformation has created a virtuous cycle: faster identification and prioritization of customer challenges leads to quicker resolution, which in turn generates more positive feedback to motivate the team. For a company with Trace’s global ambitions, this acceleration in learning and execution has proven invaluable. The distributed nature of their team has transformed from a potential obstacle into a strength, as they can now effectively capture and act on customer insights from every corner of their operation.

Looking ahead: The future of sustainable tech

For companies building products that address critical global challenges like climate change, the ability to move quickly and decisively is paramount. Trace’s experience shows how AI can help mission-driven companies maintain their velocity while scaling globally.

Their advice to other teams facing similar challenges is straightforward:

“Give Twine a go, now. It’ll save your team time and increase your speed to solving key customer problems.”

The story of Trace demonstrates that in the fight against climate change, technology isn’t just part of the solution they’re building—it’s also key to how they build it. By leveraging AI to strengthen their customer connection, they’re able to focus more energy on their core mission: helping every business reach net zero.

Want to learn how Twine can help your product team make better decisions? Book a demo.