Case Study
Building a more scalable approach to customer insight through customer research panel strategy and research operations
Questrade
Impact
16% improvement in Customer Research Panel subscription in 3 months.
Streamlined operations by creating a unified panel repository and automating communication, resulting in more efficient panel management. Improved research participation through personalized invitations and incentives, which kept panel members engaged and active. Supported business decisions by delivering valuable insights through regular research activities, enabling data-driven innovation and customer-centric solutions.
Client
Questrade
Role
Lead CX Researcher — Customer Insight Strategy & Research Operations
Duration
~6–8 months
Context
As customer-centered decision-making became increasingly embedded across Product, Experience, and Innovation teams, the demand for customer research accelerated significantly. More initiatives required validation before investment, more teams needed direct access to customers, and more strategic decisions depended on understanding customer needs and behaviors earlier and more consistently. However, while the importance of customer insight continued to grow, the supporting infrastructure had not evolved at the same pace. The existing customer research panel was functional, but much of its operation depended heavily on manual coordination. Participation experiences varied across initiatives, ownership remained fragmented across teams, and operational practices lacked consistency and scalability. Customer access existed, but the systems supporting long-term engagement, governance, and continuous learning remained disconnected. Over time, the challenge became less about conducting more research and more about strengthening the organizational conditions required for customer understanding to scale effectively across teams.
Approach
The initiative resisted a recruitment-first approach. Recruitment solves customer access in the short term, but it does not automatically improve participation quality, sustain engagement, or strengthen the organization's ability to continuously learn from customers. The strategy evolved across four connected layers. Phase 1 — Panel Automation: improved participant onboarding, profiling, consent management, screening, and automated communication, reducing dependency on manual coordination. Phase 2 — Panel Management: established clearer ownership models, more structured customer access pathways, operational protocols, participation governance, and centralized panel management practices across teams. Phase 3 — Panel Engagement: treated participation as an ongoing relationship rather than isolated recruitment events, improving communication and engagement mechanisms to make participation easier to sustain. Phase 4 — ResearchOps: strengthened intake workflows, research coordination, governance, knowledge management, and collaboration across teams, reducing friction in how customer insight was requested, managed, and translated into product and experience decisions.
Key Insights
One of the most meaningful strategic shifts was moving the conversation beyond research execution and toward capability building. Customer panels create value only when participation becomes easier to sustain and insight becomes easier to operationalize. Rather than introducing advanced engagement practices immediately, the strategy prioritized strengthening foundational capabilities first — clearer onboarding experiences, healthier participation expectations, improved communication practices, and reduced friction across panel operations. Only once stronger consistency and adoption were established did the work introduce more advanced opportunities to deepen participation. This sequencing helped ensure that growth remained sustainable, operational complexity remained manageable, and customer insight could increasingly become part of everyday decision-making.
Strategic Impact
The work enabled more scalable customer access across teams, healthier participation and engagement practices, reduced operational coordination friction, stronger governance and panel sustainability, improved research operations and workflow consistency, and better conditions for integrating customer insight into product and experience decisions. The initiative contributed to approximately 16% improvement in onboarding and engagement outcomes, increased panel participation and operational efficiency, and stronger adoption of customer insight practices across teams. Most importantly, it created stronger foundations for customer understanding to influence decisions more consistently over time. It repositioned the panel from a recruitment mechanism into a strategic capability supporting continuous customer understanding and organizational learning.
Next Steps
If extended further, the next phase would focus on evolving the panel from a scalable customer access capability into a more mature customer intelligence ecosystem. Priority opportunities would include introducing more dynamic segmentation and targeting models, expanding engagement personalization, strengthening panel health monitoring, and creating stronger integration between customer insight and product planning cycles. Additional opportunities would include introducing predictive participation approaches, enabling self-serve customer access for eligible teams, and strengthening governance mechanisms to ensure sustainable adoption at scale. Over time, this direction would move the organization beyond collecting customer feedback and toward establishing a more continuous and proactive customer learning capability.