User Interviews saves hours, unlocks new markets with Tremendous

The highlight reel

• User Interviews is the fastest way to recruit quality participants for UX research. 

• Before Tremendous, the UX research company used another vendor to send incentives to research participants. But the vendor couldnʼt send incentives in certain countries, and the participant experience was lacking.

• User Interviews resorted to time-consuming manual processes to send a portion of incentives and collect W9s for users who sent more than $600 to a single research participant.

• After switching to Tremendous, the operations team was able to process all payouts in bulk with the click of a button.

The problem

User Interviews, a UX research platform that connects researchers and participants, is used by thousands of companies ranging from Adobe and Microsoft to startups with less than 100 people. The company simplifies the UX research process end-to-end, from recruiting participants to thanking them for their time, to integrating with a variety of testing tools.

Before finding Tremendous, User Interviews used a different incentives platform to send incentives. But it had some limitations.

Namely: the vendor couldn’t send incentives in certain countries, and it lacked W-9 collection functionality.

Issues with international sending

“[The vendor] didn’t cover all of the countries that we support, like South Africa, so we had to process those payouts manually with Amazon,” said Peter Zhao, Senior Strategy and Operations Manager at User Interviews.

The ops team had to log into a different Amazon website to order gift cards for each country.

“With [our old vendor], we had to juggle multiple logins for every batch of international incentives,” said Eve Fickett, Senior Operations Manager at User Interviews. “That wasn’t sustainable, especially as we expanded our engagement program.”

To speed up recruitment, User Interviews would sometimes pay candidates $5-10 for completing an application. Sending small bulk payouts required even more time and effort.

“We had to manually input the data for every country — $10 to these applicants in the US, £7 for applicants in the UK, and different amounts for other regions,” said Eve. “The process took us at least 2 hours per week and it wasn’t scalable.”

Manual tax form collection

Tax form collection was also a pain. The finance team had to manually download reporting from their old vendor and use a separate platform to collect W-9s for users who sent more than $600 to a single research participant.

“[Our old vendor’s] manual processes were creating inefficiencies across our org,” Eve said. “We needed a better way to send and track incentives.”

The fix

Simplifying global incentives

Initially, User Interviews only used Tremendous to process gift cards that couldnʼt be sent with their previous vendor. In particular, they used Tremendous to send incentives internationally to participants in South Africa and other countries that lacked coverage on other platforms.

The depth and breadth of Tremendous’ global coverage was what initially piqued Peter’s interest. With Tremendous, User Interviews could offer recipients in 200 countries more than 2,000 ways to redeem their incentive.

“Then, when we started using it, we realized that the bulk send feature was a lot faster than our manual flow,ˮ said Peter. “And our finance team needed a way to automate W-9 collection.”

“That’s when we decided to use Tremendous for all our payment processing.”

Fighting fraud

Fraud is rampant in research: estimates vary, but our own data shows up to 40% of companies experience some sort of research incentive fraud.

While User Interviews is still in the testing phase with the Tremendous fraud feature, they appreciate the added layer of security to supplement their robust fraud prevention systems.

"Having another line of defense against fraud gives us peace of mind," Peter said. “It was super easy to set up, too. We just bulk uploaded our top offending IP addresses and now they’re automatically blocked.”

A smooth transition to Tremendous

“The account executive at Tremendous said the switch would be easy — and he was right,” said Eve.

The engineering team followed Tremendous’ straightforward API docs to build the integration and complete the migration fast.

“It was very, very quick,” Eve said. “It only took two engineers to work on it over the course of two weeks and it was done.”

“We were a little bit skeptical at first and wondered if it was all too good to be true. But the migration was as smooth and easy as promised.”

After that, the transition was seamless for both User Interviews’ operations department and the platform’s research participants.

“The Tremendous UI is intuitive, so there wasn’t much of a learning curve for us,” said Peter. “The redemption flow was intuitive for our users too, so it was frictionless for everyone.”

The outcome

With Tremendous, User Interviews’ saves hours on payouts processing every month. That frees up the operations team to focus on strategy for continued growth.

"Processing everything in bulk rather than going to different sites and processing them one-by-one saved us 8 hours per month," Eve said. “It’s a huge time-saver — all we have to do is press a single button.”

The finance team is equally delighted with Tremendous’ automated W-9 collection. Now, W-9 forms are automatically sent to participants who receive more than $600, significantly reducing the manual effort required for tax compliance.

“Now, those participants have to provide their W-9 data before they can redeem their reward,” Eve said. “We really appreciate having that extra safeguard to drive compliance.”

Perhaps most importantly, Tremendous has opened up new possibilities expanding User Interviews' reach with 2,000 reward options in 200+ countries.

"There’s more opportunity to test new markets and provide more incentive options," Peter said. "Tremendous has enabled us to think more about where we can experiment next internationally."

Want to spend less time sending incentives to participants all over the world? Chat with our team, or sign up now and send your first incentive in minutes.