Managing a User Research Panel

An interview with Tiffany Stanfield, LexisNexis Global Research Panel Manager

Previously, I wrote about our process for building our own internal user panel. Now that the panel is three years old, we’ve learned a lot about the care and feeding necessary to grow and manage it and thought that others would benefit from learning from our experiences. In order to get into the nitty gritty of this story, I sat down with the person who has real expertise on the topic — our panel manager, Tiffany Stanfield.

First, a bit of background…

At LexisNexis, we are a B2B organization with a fairly difficult-to-reach audience. In order to address this problem, we created a custom, in-house user panel, which has provided us with the ability to streamline our recruiting efforts and focus instead on actually doing research.

Over the last three years, we’ve grown the panel exponentially to include an increasingly broad set of users across eight countries and two languages. This growth in panel membership has directly translated into increased engagement with our customers and target users: in 2019 we ran hundreds of user research studies reaching thousands of users, and we’re on track to more than double our numbers in 2020.

Also over the last three years, countries around the globe have been enacting legislation to protect consumer privacy and data. Having the panel in place eased the process of ensuring compliance within the company and with the laws for each country.

By all measures the panel has been a huge success, but we would never have been able to achieve this success without one key critical component: our panel manager. A little over a year ago we realized that we needed a dedicated resource to look after and grow the panel (and other operational aspects of our team). Thanks to the wisdom of the ResearchOps Community, we had insight into the skills and personality characteristics needed to be successful in this role, and we were fortunate enough to find and recruit Tiffany Glasscock, LexisNexis Global Panel Manager.

Tiffany Stanfield, LexisNexis Global Panel Manager

What was in place when you started at LexisNexis?
The panel infrastructure was already in place. I was pleasantly surprised everything that was going through one channel into one directory. All the meta data tags didn’t make sense immediately to someone who is just starting out, but I’ve been able to quickly wrap my head around it. So, that made it really easy to just start recruiting more or less.

What was your first priority after you joined LexisNexis?
The panel growth and recruitment process wasn’t in place, so that was something I could start on immediately since the foundation was already there. We were able to start recruiting customers and different audience types where we had gaps. Initially it was product-usage focused, and now we’re moving more toward different types of users.

What was the hardest part about growing the panel?
If it were just up to me, I would just reach out to users via a marketing campaign. If people are interested, they click the link and sign up. Easy peasy, right?

For various reasons, stakeholders can be protective of their customer base which can lead to small roadblocks in your recruitment plan. This can be relieved by communication and education. We’re not spamming users, we’re asking them to participate in a professional community where they can actually feel like their voice is being heard. So it’s just an educational challenge that we have to face.

Do you think that’s a challenge unique to enterprise organizations?
Yes, absolutely. For the sales reps, their livelihood depends on having a good relationship with their clients, and they don’t want anyone messing that up — which is totally understandable. I wouldn’t want anyone doing that either. So I think it’s especially true in the enterprise.

What do you think the biggest value of the panel is to the organization?
Access to users. Customer engagement in general is just booming here. It’s very top of mind for all product teams. Everyone wants to have some kind of engagement with their customer base. It’s been invaluable especially for the people who recruit using the panel on a weekly basis. For example, one of our researchers sent out 20 emails and had 10 people sign up within just a day or two. It makes research turnaround times a lot faster than going through a third-party agency or your sales team. Our panelists are ready and willing to participate, and their expectations are set already.

But that also presents a challenge, because now that we have such easy access, everyone wants access, and as much as we’ve grown it’s not enough to support everyone (yet).

What are the biggest challenges you’ve encountered?
Privacy regulations. Being a consumer myself, I don’t give out my information as freely as I once did. Everyone has a hypersensitivity to having their information out there. So that’s a challenge we face, especially in the industry we’re in.

People might be a little more hesitant to offer up their details so readily. I’m getting more and more emails to recruiting campaigns that actually highlight our terms and conditions and asking for more clarity. So I think people are paying attention more to what’s actually being done with the data collected by companies like ours.

So you must have a processes in place and make sure you’re in close communication with your compliance team (if you’re lucky enough to have one). We’re in a fortunate position where there are literally lawyers everywhere here. If you don’t have access to that type of expertise, it puts you at so much risk.

Another big challenge is just growth and meeting the competing needs of different stakeholders. If you’re growing your panel in different geographies you’ll likely encounter differences in things like nomenclature, translations, local product offerings, or just approach.

So you have to either find ways to customize the questionnaire, make it super general, or have different paths for different geographies. Or, it might even be different for two different business units within the same geography. It can exponentially be a logistical problem.

For now I’ve been taking the approach of having all panelists be funneled through one channel or profile survey with different branches, based on conditions like geography or business unit. It’s working for now, but we may need to get to the point where we start separating things for different audiences. The benefit of our approach, though, is that we can summarize data about our users across business units, which is extremely beneficial to the organization.

How did you go about cleaning up the meta information about your panelists?
It’s just some manual work up front. It’s just about fully understanding what the intent was behind capturing the data in the first place. Then, identifying either duplicates or unnecessary data, which goes back to CCPA and GDPR — we don’t want to be collecting information that we’re not using.

We review the changes with a small set of the team so that we can make decisions quickly, but I wouldn’t make changes without reviewing it with them first.

Any advice on managing stakeholders?
I think it’s just fully understanding the intent behind the feedback, and not taking offense to it. Which goes back to the fundamentals of research in general — trying to empathize with them and really understand the problem and navigating a solution for them.

So, in a sense you are a user researcher, and your audience is us, the internal researchers and stakeholders.
Yes, I guess that’s true. You can’t always address every single piece of feedback. It’s impossible. So you really have to gather it, listen, and prioritize what’s going to be the best solution for everyone.

So, in a sense, you’re also a product manager?
Yeah, I guess so.

What are some of your other responsibilities?
I help with survey writing / review and provide training for best practices when creating a questionnaire.

I manage the incentive process so I can make sure that the panelists get paid promptly. And I manage the data tracking associated with all of our research so that the senior leadership has visibility into what our team is doing.

What else do I do? Lots of process, lots of process creation, and best practices. I create tutorials for people who don’t work in user research so that they can conduct their own studies. And I create templates for the user research team, to help streamline their workload.

What’s the most clever thing you’ve done with the panel?
Going through the whole reprofiling process was the cleverest thing I’ve been able to do. I like puzzles, and when you get deep into the data and logic of a complicated survey, it’s kind of like a puzzle. We are now trying to reprofile anyone who has been in the panel for a year. But it’s not easy to do with the functionality that’s offered “off the shelf” with Qualtrics. So just finding a workaround solution for that was fun.

And Qualtrics told you that it couldn’t be done.
Yeah, I had to apply a little bit of creative problem solving to find a solution for that. And now we have a process for it, whereas we didn’t before.

Thanks to Tiffany for being willing to be interviewed for this story! If you’ve got questions about panel management be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn.