Market and User Research Operations: Operationalize Customer Research for Scale and Impact

Research Operations is a reasonably new field but one that offers businesses huge opportunities to produce more high-quality customer insights by reducing the administrative toll on research departments, freeing up resource to deliver more value.

With customers demanding more personalization of experiences, fully understanding the consumer and their experience of your brand or product has never been more important. This, in turn, is increasing the demand for more, higher quality customer insights, and as a result, research teams are under more pressure than ever. However, many companies don’t yet fully understand how they can operationalize their research in order to scale consistent and robust research practices, enabling their teams to create more impactful research outcomes that deliver the much needed value to key stakeholders.

This is a practical guide on what exactly research operations is and how it can benefit your research by streamlining your administration so the research team can focus on delivering more impactful insights with more frequency on time and to budget. This guide takes mid-career professionals through how you can reduce waste by increasing the capability of reusing past research and minimizing the potential for doing unnecessary research, how to plan your research to ensure the best outcome and how to choose the best tools for your research and business needs. It covers the incredibly practical, from considerations of GDPR, how to recruit participants and how to set up research projects so they run smoothly, as well as providing insight into how AI can be used as part of the research process, how to democratize research and how to adapt to changing needs and requirements.

Stephanie Marsh (she/they) is a leading UX research professional, currently UX Research Operations Lead at Springer Nature based in London, UK. They are the former Head of User Research and Analysis for the UK Government Digital Service and former Head of Digital Strategy for the UK Ministry of Defence. She was previously a consultant at Bunnyfoot, a leading UX consultancy in the UK. They have contributed chapters to a range of peer-reviewed texts in related fields and has delivered talks on UX Research, Research Operations and UX strategies at a range of conferences and industry events.