Enrich Panel: A Guide to Level 4 of Research Hub Maturity

The Research Hub Maturity Map details four primary approaches to panel management with User Interviews. Each level represents a fundamental building block to achieving the highest levels of research excellence within an organization.

At the final level of research maturity, teams achieve a scaled, data-rich panel with strong governance in place to ensure protocols are set and maintained across all researchers. This level is a great option for large, highly active research teams or those with more complexity in tools, processes, and communication across the org. 

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to achieve Level 4: Enriched Panel, including: 

• What building an enriched panel at Level 4 entails 
• When and why your team might want to focus on building an enriched panel
• Tutorials and best practices for getting started 

📓 Note: This is the last of 4 guides diving deeper into the Research Hub Maturity Map. If you haven’t read Automate Research (Level 1), Standardize Research (Level 2), or Curated Panel (Level 3), you may want to start there.

What is Level 4 of the Research Hub Maturity Map: Enriched Panel?

At this level, research is scaled with a data-rich panel and strong governance. Teams operating at this level are taking advantage of all the advanced automation features and data integrations included in our Hub CRM plan. Leveraging the API and data integrations to pipe in real-time data from other systems allows you to keep participant profiles up to date without manual review and segment your panel based on more advanced criteria.

While teams at every level have some governance and standardization in place, teams at Level 4 have a deeper, more involved approach to governance. With stricter governance, many researchers and people who do research (such as UX designers or product managers) can confidently recruit from Research Hub without additional, time-consuming oversight from research and ops leaders.

Key User Interviews features used in Level 4:

• All features from Levels 1, 2, and 3, plus…
• Data integrations with Zapier, Census, Hightouch via the API and other custom integrations 
• COMING SOON: Native data integrations with tools like Salesforce, Snowflake, HubSpot, and more

Who uses Level 4: Enriched Panel?

Enriching your panel is a great opportunity for teams who struggle with maintaining rich, up-to-date user profiles as the volume and complexity of their research scales. For example, teams commonly decide to integrate Hub with the other tools they use to manage customer data in order to:

• Quickly and automatically honor unsubscribes across all communication tools
• Keep Hub customer data up to date if a CRM tool like Salesforce is serving as the source of truth
• Automate adding new customers to Hub when they subscribe through other channels
• Automate deleting customers after a certain period of time
• Integrate with database or product analytics tools to enable targeting based on in-product behavior or other custom criteria

Typically, these research teams tend to be large, highly active, and/or have a number of disparate tools they use to manage customer data. 

How to get started with Research Hub Level 4: Enriched Panel

🚀 Get started with Research Hub Level 4: Enriched Panel
‍1. Revisit team templates, defaults, and processes to ensure best practices are enforced across your team. 
2. Set up the API and custom integrations to feed live data into Hub. 
3. COMING SOON: Use our native data integrations with tools like Salesforce, Snowflake, HubSpot, and more.  
4. Continue to monitor and update your panel management approach over time. 

1. Revisit team templates, defaults, and processes to ensure best practices are enforced across your team. 

Before integrating Research Hub with your other tools, it’s helpful to ensure that other fundamental features are set up properly and that best practices are enforced across your team. 

At this stage, you should double-check that:

• Every researcher on your team is following best practices for screening, scheduling, email notifications, and other aspects of the recruiting workflow—see Automate Research (Level 1).
• Custom branding, templates, defaults, and other standardization features are put in place to ensure consistent, professional communication with participants at every touchpoint. See Standardize Research (Level 2)

You may have already developed strong processes around cleaning, maintaining and growing your panel in Level 3 of Research Hub Maturity, but you can bypass some of this manual work by setting up your data integrations early on. 

2. Set up the API and data integrations to feed live data into Hub. 

Once your fundamentals are put in place, you can set up the API and/or custom data integrations to start feeding live data into Hub. There are multiple ways to build with the Hub API, with varying levels of infrastructure and resourcing required:

• Zapier integration: Our lowest-effort, no-code integration—all you need is a Zapier subscription and a basic technical understanding to connect to 5,000+ tools.
• Census or HighSpot integrations: These low-code integrations require a data warehouse supported by Census/Hightouch, a Census/Hightouch subscription, and an estimated 1 week of your data team’s time.
• Custom integration: Requires developers who can build the integration, access to the APIs of the tools you’re connecting, and an estimated 1-3 weeks of developer time. 

To join our API program, you’ll need to apply through our intake form on this page, and we’ll manually review your information for technical and use case fit. ‍If accepted, we’ll be in touch with API keys, technical docs, and all the information you’ll need to start building. At that point, it’ll be in your hands to either build custom integrations or use Zapier or Census to transfer data into Hub from a wide range of data sources.

✍️ Note that set up can take anywhere from 1 to 2 days to 2+ weeks, depending on your use case, how you choose to implement, and the state of your data infrastructure—so it’s important to scope the project ahead of time and plan for this implementation buffer. 

For more information, reference our API technical documentation or contact your customer success representative or api@userinterviews.com with questions.

3. COMING SOON: Use our native data integrations with tools like Salesforce, Snowflake, HubSpot, and more.  

Currently, our product team is in the process of building native, third-party data integrations with tools like Salesforce, Snowflake, and HubSpot. These integrations will be much easier to set up than those using the API, especially for teams who struggle to secure engineering support. 

Stay tuned for the first batch of these integrations to launch in late 2024, and keep an eye on our Integrations page for more information. 

4. Continue to monitor and update your panel management approach over time.

After data integrations, team features, and other best practices are put in place, you should still regularly review and update your panel management approach as needed. 

For example, you may want to:

• Re-send opt-in forms once a year to have participants self-report any updates to their profile. This ensures that your Hub database reflects any changes that wouldn’t otherwise have been captured by live data feeds or research activity. 
• Regularly monitor your segments and the custom data points to determine if new options are needed to support future research.

With Research Hub’s unique package of research workflow automation, team-wide standardization, simplified panel management, and flexible data integrations, you’ll have the strongest foundation in place to become a high-performing research team.  

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