CASE STUDY
Efficient, data-driven, and compliant participant recruitment
Building a robust customer panel to support high-impact research at scale.50% less time to recruit
Recruiting accuracy and efficiently enhanced by access to rich user data from the panel survey and reliably higher response rates from panel members.
6,000+ members
Between 2020 and 2024, over 6,000 verified users became members of the Zendesk Experience Research Panel.
100% compliance
Panel onboarding and engagement systems and processes developed in partnership with legal counsel to comply with GDPR, CCPA and other regulations.
Challenge
Contacting users directly involved a lengthy six-week wait for a marketing calendar slot or required substantial effort to arrange a single interview through the customer’s account team. Response rates were disappointingly low, and the extended recruitment timeline often led teams to forgo valuable research altogether.
Previous efforts to maintain a panel of users interested in research relied on outdated, informal systems, such as shared spreadsheets with inconsistent data entry. This led to noncompliance, unreliable data, and a cumbersome experience for panel members. The lack of organization also resulted in email fatigue and inefficiencies in managing participation.
Solution
Strategic campaigns invite users to a sleek, engaging landing page with concise information about joining the research panel and a link to the short onboarding questionnaire. On the backend, a participant database was built automatically coding responses from the questionnaire into standardized labels, giving researchers access to information about user roles and product relationships, with realtime participation history and opt-out status piped in from other tools. This streamlined process ensures both compliance and enhanced participant engagement, creating a more enjoyable experience for both customers and researchers.
The story
If you’ve reached out for customer support after buying something online in recent years, chances are you started by visiting the seller’s help center. From there, you might have called, sent an email, submitted a ticket, or chatted with an agent to get your issue resolved. But if you spotted a “powered by Zendesk” logo on any of those interactions, your experience was shaped by insights gathered from real customers, thanks to the Zendesk Experience Research Panel.
Zendesk’s journey began in 2007 with just 1,000 trial customers. Fast forward to 2019, and the company had transformed into a global leader, serving 145,000 customers and generating over $816 million in revenue. Big names like Airbnb, Tesco, L'Oréal, and Ingersoll Rand relied on Zendesk’s suite of tools to support their customer service needs. That same year, Zendesk launched its first centralized UX research team with a clear mission: to design better products informed by the voices of real customers—delivering what they truly wanted and needed.
As customer expectations evolved, so did the demand for more frequent and wide-reaching user studies. The team needed a way to quickly recruit a diverse, global pool of participants while navigating strict compliance rules. Enter the Zendesk Experience Research Panel: a group of engaged, motivated users who were more likely to respond to email requests, eager to help shape the products they used.
One of the biggest hurdles was ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulations like GDPR, while making sure researchers had access to the right users. The research panel solved both of these issues: customers gave their consent to participate, while the team gained crucial insights into who they were reaching out to—making every study more targeted, efficient, and impactful.
My role
The research panel made efficient, data-driven participant recruitment a reality by ensuring compliance requirements were met while giving researchers easy access to rich participant information—without having to code a line of SQL.