"User Interviews has completely removed any of the friction aspect of research. Before we onboarded User Interviews, we were using this horrendously complex mishmash of free softwares. What it does is take away all of the horrible, hard, time-consuming parts of user research.
It’s the best out there in terms of B2B CRM end user management, without question."
Panel management software helps research teams to recruit efficiently from their user base and manage interactions with participants. It is a dedicated research tool that houses a database of participants, coordinates team-wide recruitment based on custom rules, and maintains a central record of research activity.
Panel software also includes research-specific automations, such as screening, scheduling, and incentives, that make recruiting and managing participants much faster and easier.
There are several different ways to recruit your users into research studies.
We recommend dedicated panel management tools for organizations that regularly conduct research with their customers. These tools help teams to quickly reach their target audience, stay coordinated while scaling up research volume, and maintain recruitment standards.
Other ways of recruiting users include finding users from general purpose CRM tools, working with customer success teams to identify good research prospects, or manual outreach through email, social media, and other networks. These DIY research recruitment methods can be successful, however they tend to be less targeted and more time intensive.
You can build your research panel through opt-in forms, CSV uploads, and data integrations. Research Hub supports all of these methods.
Creating opt-in forms and promoting these through your company’s communication channels allows you to source highly-motivated users and collect relevant data about them. Because these customers have raised their hand to be involved in ongoing research efforts, they often yield high response rates.
Importing CSVs of customer emails is a quick way to get started with building your panel. These customer lists can be exported from other CRM tools, or else your data team can help to pull relevant segments of users. You can map columns in your CSV to custom data fields in the Hub panel—these will be useful for research targeting.
Syncing customer data using a participant API and integrations is a more advanced way of building your panel and maintaining data quality.
Any team can successfully build a research panel by following some best practices. In larger companies with a mature research practice, panel management is often led by Research Operations. However smaller teams that don’t have a dedicated research operations team can still benefit from automating recruitment, standardizing research, and maintaining a panel.
First, speed up user recruitment with screener surveys, automated emails, and a participant incentives program. It’s also good practice to ensure you’re collecting data consent from all research participants.
Next, standardize research across the team using communication templates and company branding. Consistent, professional research communication will help to build trust amongst your user community.
Once you’ve mastered those basics, you’re ready to start building and curating your panel. You may consider using opt-in forms, setting contact rules and limits, organizing your panel into segments, and sending nurture campaigns.
Mature research teams may want to go the extra step of enriching their panel through data integrations, and implementing more advanced research governance.
Learn more about best practices for panel management for teams at any stage of research maturity.
We offer two plans on Research Hub—Workflow and CRM. Both plans help teams to run research with their own users.
The Workflow plan gives you access to automations that make it fast and easy to invite users to research studies, screen and schedule sessions, communicate and track participation, and pay out incentives. You also get access to customizations such as branding and templates, custom domains and sender profiles, and a data consent notice.
With the CRM plan, you get all of the automations and customizations included in the Workflow plan, plus a research CRM to build and manage your own panel. You can add panel members through CSV upload, data integrations, and opt-in forms, then create segments and set up guardrails that make it easy to recruit participants and survey respondents.
See our pricing page for plan details.
We can set up a limited trial of Research Hub for you to evaluate whether it’s the right panel management solution for your team. Contact Sales to get started with a product demo and free trial.
