Engaging families on a budget

Engaging families on a budget: a customer panel success story

In collaboration with Very, we recruited six respondents to take part in a customer panel! We love these types of market research projects, giving stakeholders the opportunity to get closer to their customers and hear about their experiences first-hand.

The recruitment brief was specific. Participants needed to be existing Very customers who fitted the profile of families living on a budget, as well as being able to travel to Very’s offices in Speke, Liverpool, for the live session.

And for a customer panel, finding people who fit the criteria on paper is only part of the job. With participants taking to the stage in front of hundreds of Very team members, it was important to recruit people who would feel comfortable sharing their experiences and contributing naturally to the conversation.

As is standard with Angelfish participant recruitment, each participant was phone validated by our team before being confirmed. This gave us the opportunity to check that they genuinely matched the brief and speak to them one-to-one ahead of the research – an especially important step when recruiting for a live, stakeholder-facing session.

The customers then had a pre-task to complete, where they recorded self-introduction videos, followed by a 75-minute in-person customer panel at Very’s offices in Speke. This gave participants the chance to introduce themselves before the event and helped set the scene for the discussion to follow.

The customer panel itself took place on stage in front of an audience of approximately 300 Very team members and was live streamed to additional colleagues. It was a brilliant opportunity to amplify the Voice of the Customer, bringing real customer experiences directly to the people making decisions about them.

With such a visible format, getting the recruitment right really matters. The participants needed to meet a niche brief, be able to attend in person and, importantly, feel at ease talking openly in an environment that was very different from a traditional research session.

The project was a resounding success for Very, and our market research participants expressed how much they enjoyed the experience too. Our strong partnership with Very has since continued across several rounds of customer panel research – a lovely endorsement of a format that puts genuine customer voices right at the heart of the business.