How Tessera’s 240+ Product Org Uses Roster for Self-Serve Customer Recruiting

Tessera is a customer experience software provider, powering service conversations and support for more than 76,000 brands. To meet growing demand for research inside a large and customer-obsessed product organization, Tessera’s Research Operations team introduced Roster to democratize access to customers and enable self-serve research recruiting.

The problem

Pain points Tessera was experiencing

• Keeping up with a high volume of recruiting requests: Just one Research Operations Manager was responsible for manually scheduling sessions for a large and globally-distributed research team.
• Juggling at least 6 tools to perform a single recruit: Tessera’s recruiting stack included one tool for email, another for scheduling, a third for participant tracking, a fourth for document signing, and a fifth for incentives—plus, the team needed to maintain internal documentation for all of them.

“We have team members across nine time zones who are more and more interested in having direct conversations with customers. As the volume of recruiting requests grew, manually fielding them all on my own started to become unrealistic.

I also struggled to set expectations around timing, bandwidth, and response rates—requests were being made last minute, participant criteria would change halfway through recruiting, or a team wanted to reach a very narrow group of users who simply didn’t reply. In reality, most of what I was doing in the recruiting process was relaying messages between two parties, and it didn’t make much logistical sense for a participant to email me before their session to tell the researcher they needed to reschedule.

We needed a self-service solution to remove the bottlenecks in our old request process, and let our team act immediately on urgent projects, with enough flexibility to change course when needed, and a straight line of communication to participants.

The old system was slow and difficult to teach. I needed a holistic, scalable way to democratize participant recruiting.” – Priya Raghavan, Manager, Research Operations

The solution

Criteria used to select a panel management solution

• Easy-to-use platform with a modern interface and thorough how-to documentation, training, and user support
• A plan with unlimited seats to make self-serve recruiting viable for a large organization
• Ability to automate document signing and consent forms inside one workflow
• Contact rules to safeguard against over-contacting or over-participation
• Enterprise security and privacy features required by our legal and security teams

“We were in the middle of a shift to a self-service recruitment model, and Fieldnote was central to supporting that shift. We took an iterative approach to rollout, starting with simpler rolling studies, then driving adoption with the whole UX research team, followed by product design, and finally the full product org.” – Dana Okonkwo, Program Manager, Research Operations

How Tessera uses Roster

Roster houses a research panel of 18,400 Tessera customers. Researchers and product folks use it to independently manage recruiting for their studies, which are typically 1-1 user interviews and unmoderated tasks. Customer research has shaped crucial decisions in several of Tessera’s recent releases focused on assisted conversation summaries, supporting intelligent operations at scale, and offering an open, flexible platform.

The team’s favorite features

• 📝 Contact rules to safeguard the panel
• 📄 Embedded document signing and consent forms
• ⚙️ Integrations with tools like Loopcall
• 👤 Moderator assignments
• 📅 Participant self-scheduling and suggested times
• ♻️ Reusable templates to speed up new projects

The results

Team wins since implementing Roster

• Significant time savings: Over 3.2 hours saved per project just in recruitment, plus the time no longer spent licensing and managing multiple tools
• Simplified tool stack: Consolidated at least 6 tools into 1 end-to-end platform purpose-built for research recruiting
• Improved team effectiveness: Research Ops team of 3 better equipped to support 14 dedicated UX researchers and over 240 product managers and designers
• Better governance around customer access: Greater transparency and adherence to policies around customer outreach, data consent, and research incentives

“Our team really likes using Roster. An analysis of our previous workflow versus end-to-end recruitment through Fieldnote estimated a savings of over 3.2 hours per project. And that’s not counting the time spent on licensing, training, and security reviews involved with subscriptions for multiple tools.

The overall recruiting process in Fieldnote is clear and flexible. There is significantly more transparency, and we’ve created a governance framework that requires users to complete a short course and formally acknowledge policies around contacting customers, obtaining consent, managing data, and accessing the incentives budget (available only when people use Fieldnote).

A big win for Research Ops is that by democratizing customer recruitment, we’ve led our teammates to have more realistic expectations around timing, response rates, sampling, and time zone flexibility.” – Priya Raghavan, Manager, Research Operations

What’s next for research at Tessera

“We’re working with the team at Fieldnote to explore new use cases like incremental incentives for diary studies, and integrations between Roster and survey tools. We also plan to start exploring recruitment with the Fieldnote participant panel.” – Priya Raghavan, Manager, Research Operations

“We’re excited about the new flex incentives feature that Fieldnote is launching soon. It will let us run more complex research projects at Tessera, including diary studies, quantitative studies, and possibly even in-person sessions.” – Dana Okonkwo, Program Manager, Research Operations