Insurance software moves fast. Coordinating research across dozens of designers, account teams, and agencies shouldn’t slow you down. With User Interviews Hub, Applied Systems unified how its UX and product teams manage participants, schedule multi-person agency sessions, and track research activity—replacing scattered spreadsheets, Salesforce lists, and manual scheduling with one organized system. And with Recruit built right in, the team can instantly expand beyond its own customers to reach licensed underwriters, brokers, and carriers when internal panels aren’t enough.

Challenges Before Hub + Recruit

• Fragmented participant tracking: Each designer kept their own list in Salesforce or spreadsheets, leading to lack of centralization.
• Scheduling breakdowns: Calendly couldn’t handle multi-person agency interviews, forcing manual coordination.
• Cohort complexity: 12-week projects ran across Confluence, Figma, and email - “too many moving parts, too confusing.”
• Ops bottlenecks: A new research ops hire was tasked with list management but lacked scalable tools.
• Niche recruiting gaps: Finding specific personas like commercial underwriters was slow and inconsistent.
• Zero-incentive model: Participants were internal customers and agency partners who join research voluntarily.

How Hub + Recruit Solve It

• Centralized Participant CRM: One place to store, tag, and segment participants that's fully integrated with Salesforce for one-way syncing.
• Multi-person Scheduling: Book several agency contacts in a single session, with automated reminders, NDAs, and custom communications.
• Cohort Project Management: Manage recurring or multi-week cohorts inside one project; share schedules with teams and reduce email noise.
• Ops Efficiency: Upload bulk lists via CSV, filter by usage or role, and automate outreach with custom templates.
• Custom NDA & Compliance: Upload legal documents once; automate collection and storage for every participant.
• External Recruitment via Recruit: When Applied needs to reach beyond its customer base, like commercial underwriters, claims specialists, or brokerage decision-makers, Recruit delivers pre-qualified participants from a vetted network of over 5 million professionals, all discoverable within the same workflow.

Results with Hub + Recruit

• Research ops freed from manual list management and scheduling.
• 25–30 designers now run studies through a single, scalable system.
• Cohorts and agency sessions coordinated automatically instead of across Confluence and Figma.
• Hard-to-reach roles like underwriters recruited quickly through the integrated Recruit network.
• Full visibility into participant history—no more duplicate outreach or lost context.
• Maintains a zero-incentive workflow, unique in the insurance industry.