B2B Research Community - User Panel

This year Nest is in the process of planning a major enhancement of its service platform for employers and TPA's. As from June, we will need to embark on a major programme of CX and usability research with B2B customers to ensure that this enhancement is optimised.

Much research has already been carried out on where the critical "pain points" are that need to be addressed, and what needs to be changed in order to properly improve the customer experience. This new programme of CX research will test service design that will start in earnest in June and continue (at least) until the end of the 26-27 financial year.

As from June therefore we need to have a research supplier in place who will be able to support us in managing this programme. The supplier will need to recruit B2B research respondents, design interview materials and carry out the interviewing, and provide a regular flow of feedback to us so designs can be modified, after which we may return to respondents to check on changes in an iterative manner.

We are agnostic about how the supplier should provide this. On the consumer side we have our research community, however we realise that aiming to build a "community" in the B2B context would be more of a challenge and perhaps not the ideal approach to this.

To sum up, what we basically need is to have B2B respondents who will be able to engage quickly with requests for interviewing and feedback, so we can deal with the research and design in an agile manner. Given the nature of these busy, time poor respondents, we acknowledge that this is a considerable challenge.

What kind of incentives, access platforms or approaches to enable this to happen should be thoroughly considered in suppliers' responses. It is expected the whole research programme will be undertaken online.