How AppFolio 3x'd research participation with Great Question

👋 Meet Gaby Verderber and Rita Casillas from AppFolio, the leader in cloud-based property management solutions for the real estate industry.

Verderber is a trained UX Designer turned UX Operations Manager. Casillas is a Senior UX Research Operations Specialist focused on participant recruitment. Together they support 100+ UX Designers, Researchers, and Product Managers.

This often means recruiting their customers’ customers – residents who rent from property managers using AppFolio – to conduct B2B2C research, or their customers’ vendors – maintenance workers hired by property managers using AppFolio – to conduct B2B2B research. Both valuable sources of feedback. Both hard to reach.

“Whenever we saw a resident recruitment request form come through, we’d feel this pit of dread,” said Verderber. “These projects took so much effort before. But now, we get to use Great Question.”

Research life at AppFolio before Great Question

Before Great Question, Verderber and Casillas didn’t have a unified research platform. They had a stack of tools cobbled together with “digital duct tape.” Mixmax for email. Airtable for project management. WordPress for consent forms. And of course, Google Sheets.

“It was nothing but pain points,” said Casillas. “That whole process was painful for everyone, and it took a really long time to talk to who we needed and fulfill our requirements for research projects.”

Even though residents were using AppFolio’s software to pay rent, manage leases, submit maintenance requests, and more, they often didn’t recognize the company name when contacted for customer feedback.

“That’s not a nice, trusting foundation for research,” said Verderber. “That’s super awkward.”

The problem? Their process was manual and disconnected, which made it impossible to scale and formed communication silos between other areas of the organization, like customer success.

The residents they were able to schedule customer interviews with rarely showed up, despite the incentives on the table. No-show rates ranged anywhere from 60% to 100%.

“There was a day somebody had calls scheduled on a Friday from nine to five, and not a single person showed up for vendor calls,” said Verderber. “And that is absolutely miserable.”

Enough was enough. It was time for an upgrade. “We needed to ground this in some governance,” said Casillas. “We needed to centralize.”

Finding a unified platform in a sea of point solutions

Verderber and Casillas set out to find what they’d desperately been missing – a unified platform for all of their research needs – knowing it’d be a pivotal decision requiring due diligence.

“We go through a very rigorous tool evaluation process,” said Verderber. “We've had situations where we've picked tools purely based on the feature set and they've just not been adopted by our team. If we can't sell them on both governance and ease of use, we can't sell them on it.”

But they experienced several barriers that made it hard to even get started. For one, there was sales call after sales call, somehow each one longer than the last and still without any way to test-drive the product.

“We literally had three calls with one company when they requested to set up one more call with our engineering director,” said Verderber. “We hadn’t even seen the tool yet. We will not waste our engineer’s time. It was wild. I would never do it again.”

The tools they were able to see had clunky demo environments that were frustrating to use.

“There was one tool where it took us 3 hours to try and upload a contact list into the demo environment, which should be a friendly place to be,” said Casillas. “So we rage-quit, thinking, ‘it can't be this hard; someone has to have solved this.’”

Verderber turned to the ResearchOps Community for an answer. There, she discovered Great Question.

As for their rigorous evaluation process, they did see it through until the answer to their problem was crystal clear.

“Great Question passed our evaluation with flying colors,” said Verderber. “It's so easy to get people to use, we have to turn people away because we have a limited number of licenses.”

Research life at AppFolio with Great Question

Today, AppFolio uses Great Question as its unified research platform with 20 seats evenly distributed across its cross-functional product development team.

Participation rate up. No-show rate down. A week of time saved.

Research recruitment at AppFolio used to be a “miserable process” that took days of manual work with extended wait times. With Great Question, Verderber and Casillas have condensed this process down to a few hours of work – in some cases just one.

Using Great Question to streamline panel management and recruitment has empowered them to focus on more meaningful work.

“It has unlocked a lot of time for our Ops team to work on other recruitment projects, scale processes, focus on demographic data – really hone in on things that are more impactful for our team than filtering through a spreadsheet,” said Casillas. “Using filter criteria in panels is a huge time-saver for us and allows us to multiply our efforts.”

It has also empowered non-researchers on the product development team to get started conducting research on their own.

“Last week I got an incentive funding request from someone I didn't even know was setting up a study,” said Verderber. “It was a wonderful moment because it meant they said, ‘I need to do research. I know I can do it through Great Question.’”

Perhaps the biggest change? “We have killer participation rates.”

Prior to using Great Question, Casillas said their typical participation rate was roughly 10% for customer interviews; for surveys, closer to 1-2%.

Unlocking demographic data to build a more representative panel

While saving time and improving KPIs is great, Verderber notes not all wins are easy to measure.

“People need places to live, and I think it's really important that we do research with folks who are representative of the U.S. population,” said Verderber.

By using Great Question, AppFolio has been able to unlock demographic data and build a larger, more representative customer research panel.

As a result, AppFolio's research team added an OKR dedicated to building a more representative research panel.

“We haven't quantitatively measured the success yet, but the fact that we're even able to look at this is a huge win,” said Verderber. “It's so important that we don't build products that are harder for certain populations to use. I feel really strongly about this related to housing.”

What's next for Appfolio

AppFolio came to Great Question with a clear goal – to centralize research operations. The team’s initial success doing so has opened their eyes to other ways they can put the Great Question platform to work.

Take the monthly Customer Research Panel (CRP) newsletter they send to property managers. After hearing some customers were interested in hearing from them more, they decided to explore how Great Question could help.

“The CRP newsletter takes a lot of back and forth because there are integrations with a few different tools that our marketing team uses to send out emails, so that was a huge win for someone who actively manages the panel to let folks self-serve with the panel,” said Verderber. “It was great for increasing access to our customers who have expressly stated they want to hear more from us.”

So far, they’ve had 120 newsletter subscribers sign up to receive additional communication through Great Question, further diversifying their customer research panel.