Connect with your own audiences through UserTesting’s Custom Network

By Amy Wigdahl | July 15, 2020
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Leverage your own customer panels with UserTesting’s My Panel

Custom Network enables companies to onboard and connect with panels of their own users, prospects, partners, and even employees within the UserTesting platform.


Making confident, customer-centric decisions requires companies to connect with their users and get feedback from them on an ongoing basis. To capture the most holistic view of the user experience and inform areas for development and improvement, businesses need to capture feedback from all of their audiences, including customers, prospects, and partners.

To date, the UserTesting Contributor Network has helped thousands of companies across industries get the feedback they need while taking the hassle out of recruiting and managing test contributors. However, while the UserTesting Contributor Network has a broad range of test contributors that meets the needs for most situations, many research, marketing, product, and design teams depend on feedback from their current customer base to get hyper-specific, actionable insights. This sometimes requires organizations to leverage their own customer lists of loyalty members and recent buyers, for example.

While there are methods for targetting these audiences unique to your business, they’re often expensive, time-consuming, and riddled with internal barriers. Many of our customers cite the difficulties of testing with their own audiences, including things like paying contributor incentives, compliance, internal approval processes, scheduling, targeting, and more. 

To say the least, recruiting and managing your own audiences can be a challenge for even the most sophisticated organizations.

Introducing Custom Network

Custom Network takes the hassle out of collecting customer feedback by enabling companies to create and connect with panels of their own users, prospects, partners, and even employees within the UserTesting platform. This gives you the option to expand your targeting preferences from the UserTesting Contributor Network to include panels of your own custom audiences while getting feedback through self-guided video recording or Live Conversation.

Simplify panel management 

Recruiting and managing your test contributors can be a daunting task—not to mention time-consuming. From scheduling and notifying contributors to managing incentive payments, it can become a handful—quickly.

Custom Network enables you to streamline the recruitment and management of test contributors, so you can get insights from your exact audience more efficiently than ever before. By bringing your audience to the UserTesting platform, we’re able to target, notify, and schedule your contributors on your behalf. Contributors’ data (including opt-in/opt-out status) and incentive payments are also managed for you, so you focus on research.

Custom Network opens the door for us to get a deeper understanding of our current customer experiences and expectations. We were able to recruit our customers into a private panel and let UserTesting handle test notifications, incentive payments, and more for our research studies, enabling our team to focus more of our time on generating insights.” -Chris Tait, Senior UX Designer, AAA

Target your ideal audience with ease

Connecting with your ideal contributors for each test is vital to receiving accurate insights. That’s why we’ve built custom filters to help you target your users through attributes that are unique to your business context. 

All you have to do is customize your contributor profiling questions, so when people join your panel, they’ll be asked a series of questions to create custom targeting filters. These filters will help you more effectively target the right audience in the future—ensuring the feedback you receive is the actionable insight you need to build better products and experiences.

With Custom Network, we get the best of all worlds. We can onboard our own audiences onto UserTesting, enabling us to create tests, target and engage with our customers, and discover insights all through the UserTesting platform. -Andrew Frueh, VP of User Experience, HealthCatalyst

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Access contributors safely and securely

Security is important and cannot be overlooked. These are your customers, users, employees, and prospects after all. That’s why we’re putting as much emphasis on the security of your test contributors’ data as we do our own.

With Custom Network, you can securely get feedback from your contributors while ensuring the privacy of your panel. Rest assured, your panels are only accessible by your organization. And you’ll only engage contributors who opt-in, which complies with even the strictest privacy legislation like GDPR. 

We take your contributor security seriously, too—by ensuring that you get the feedback you need without exposing any contributor's Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

Efficiently capture feedback with Custom Network

Today, the customer experience is all about smarter, better, faster. This means you have to collect insights to optimize your experiences at the speed of business, leaving little time to screen, schedule, and compensate your own contributors. 

Custom Network makes it easier to connect with your own audiences by recruiting, managing, and targeting test contributors through the UserTesting platform—helping teams gain the human perspective to make truly customer-centric decisions.

We've tested Custom Network with over 120 customer accounts as part of our beta program—receiving valuable feedback.  

We can now engage with our audiences both from the UserTesting Contributor Network and our existing customer contacts, which allows us to drive more value for the business and immediately multiplies the value of UserTesting for our team. -Chris Tait, Senior UX Designer, AAA

Custom Network is available to all customers on premium plans through the UserTesting Insight Core platform.

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About the author(s)
Amy Wigdahl

Amy is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for UserTesting. When she's not advocating for customers or crafting compelling product messaging, she's most likely going for a run or managing the fans of her dogs' Instagram accounts.