When planning user research recruitment, we usually focus on sourcing participants that are not biased (in a positive or negative way) towards a particular service or product, but in some cases nothing will replace talking to a biased crowd: the users that directly engage with a company or brand.

When we need feedback on specific customer workflows, experiences, behaviours and decisions, sometimes the way to go is to recruit from a customer list – a list of customers or users provided by the client. This is a list of people who have engaged directly and voluntarily with the service or product the client offers and have provided informed consent to be contacted for the purpose of user research or similar. Under GDPR, informed consent is a must-have for this crowd, but we’ll dive more into this later in this blog.

Whilst customer lists come with their own challenges, they can also provide some positive outcomes when used correctly.

Reduced lead times
Finding participants off a customer list can be quicker than regular user research recruitment because a lot of the suitability is guaranteed from the get-go. It’s great for projects with a quick turn around requirement.

Easier niche recruitment
If you’re in a niche, B2B environment trying to recruit people who have experience using your software, for example, working from a customer list is the best way to source some of the participants you’ll need to talk to.

Better engagement
When done in the right way, using a customer list can lead to better engagement when compared to sourcing customers from scratch.

By now you may have noticed we used the expressions “when done in the right way” or “when done correctly” quite a bit in this blog. That’s because using a customer list is not a solution to all your recruitment problems by itself. Process is key with any user research, but especially within customer list recruitment. Whether you are working with an external organisation like People for Research on sourcing participants via a customer list yourself, there are a few key things to consider.

🪂 GDPR

Let’s start with one of the most important processes – the data protection rules around contacting your own customers. The process is quite straightforward if you are doing it yourself versus using an external user recruitment agency, however we find that a lot of our clients either don’t have the time to deal with the logistics of user recruitment or prefer to delegate the communication with participants to a specialised marketing team like the one we have at PFR.

The good news is that we have options that work around your needs, but more about this at the end of the blog and back to the GDPR processes for now.

If you’re doing it yourself, make sure that:

▪️ Your customers have opted in to be contacted for marketing or research purposes.

▪️ The data is kept up to date in a centralised place that all the relevant people/teams can access and any requests to be removed from contact lists or for data to be erased are being followed up.

If you’re working with an external partner to carry out this work for you, make sure that:

▪️ They have a proper GDPR policy in place and the data protection roles are properly defined. For example, at PFR our terms and conditions state that when handling customer data, the client is always the controller and PFR the processor, ensuring the client remains in full control of their data. If this is not clear from the get-go, you should request a Controller-to-Processor (or similar depending on how many parties are involved) agreement to be put in place.

▪️ Your customers have provided informed consent for their data to be shared with a third-party or that your external partner has a process in place to ensure the lawfulness of this process.

▪️ The external partner has a process in place to carry out unsubscribe or data erasure requests and that this information is being fed back to you or your team.

🔢 Data

Unless you have someone fully dedicated to keeping your customer data up to date, not everyone will be reachable. It’s very likely your list of customers will contain dead or inactive email addresses, duplicated users and other unusable data.

If you are providing an external partner with a customer list, share a bit more data than planned to account for this “dead” data. A partner with solid processes in place will be able to cleanse the data and share some stats with you – this is part of the PFR process!

🤝 Communication

We’re now at the point of actually contacting your customers to get them involved in research, so keep this in mind if you are doing it in-house:

▪️ Engage your marketing/communications team, if you have one, and ask for their help. In most cases, they will probably want to take over this step and engage the customers themselves to keep any outgoing communications consistent.

▪️ If you don’t have access to a marketing/communications team, try to create a message that is visually consistent with your brand and be as clear as possible when it comes to what you expect from your customers. Some of the tips we shared in this blog may be useful for you.

If you are working with an external partner to help you with customer recruitment, remember this:

▪️ It’s a great idea to send an introductory email, text or letter to inform your customers a third-party will contact them on behalf of your company. Based on our experience, this will massively improve engagement.

▪️ Get permission for the external partner to brand their communications according to your company’s colours, logo and style. This will create an initial visual connection.

▪️ Ensure your external partner has a process in place that allows you to review and sign off on any content, especially if your branding is being used.

⛹️ Screening

To maximise engagement, allow the interested customers to go straight from the initial communication to a pre-screening page, asking them some basic questions to determine their suitability.

As part of our process when recruiting users for moderated research, we always follow up on the pre-screening questionnaire with a phone call to ask more in-depth questions and double check their pre-screening answers – we strongly advise you to do this if you want to guarantee the quality and eloquence of your future participants.

🤸 … and more!

▪️ When sending communications to your customers, give them 48 hours to engage with you. If necessary, we advise you to run a reminder campaign to try and re-engage them, but look at your initial campaign first and analyse the stats to determine if something didn’t work particularly well. Sometimes tweaking the subject line or slightly changing the content works wonders.

▪️ Stay flexible! Just because your customers are the best people to recruit for your research, it doesn’t mean you can’t supplement your recruitment with people outside your lists, as long as they are equally suitable.

If you are unsure if a customer list is the way to go when running your research sessions, check in with the PFR team and we will be able to advise. Our service consists of two options that work around you.

Option 1: You handle your data

This is our scaled-back service option, where you keep hold of your data and manage your own communications with your customers. Where we come in is at the pre-screening stage: we build a landing page where we introduce ourselves as a third-party working with your company and asking a few initial questions, capturing the initial pre-screening data from interested participants. At this stage, we also collect informed consent from your customers to handle their data according to GDPR.

Once we have the pre-screening data, we analyse it and start the recruitment process, while giving you regular updates and advice on how to move forward if any challenges arise.

Option 2: We handle your data

This is the more complex and GDPR-heavy option, but it allows you to be completely free to focus only on the research. If you go for option 2, we handle your data in a fully compliant way and manage all the communications with your customers, alongside the screening and recruitment.

“Using customer data helps our clients understand the needs and pain points of their current users, however the recruitment process is time-consuming, requires significant GDPR considerations, and can be costly. At PFR we can alleviate these constraints allowing our clients to focus on delivering research while maintaining control and being confident their customers are treated with care.”
Nicole Partington, Client Services Manager

Recruiting from customer lists is a hot topic in user recruitment and one we have written about quite a bit. Check some of our other blogs here and here!

Maria Santos, Head of Digital Operations & Data Protection

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user research or usability testing get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with a number of end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.