👋 Meet Melissa Skrbic-Huss and Brenna Zumbro from Procare Solutions, the number one name in child care management software for over 30 years.

As Director of UI/UX, Skrbic-Huss leads a team of nine responsible for Procare’s in-app customer experience used by directors and teachers at more than 37,000 child care centers. Zumbro is the sole Sr. UX Researcher on the team, alongside six designers and a UX writer.

In 2022, Procare Solutions switched from UserTesting to Great Question – a decision that saved them $15,000 per year and seven hours on recruitment per month, while also unlocking greater visibility into the impact of research across the company.

Research challenges at Procare Solutions before Great Question

Too expensive

Skrbic-Huss inherited UserTesting when she arrived at Procare Solutions in May 2020. Immediately, she saw a disconnect between what the tool provided and what she actually needed to do her job.

Without a clear alternative in-market (Great Question launched February 2021), she was stuck – paying for a third-party panel she didn’t use, but also being held back by limited functionality and customer support in the areas of the product she did use.

“The reason why you're paying the amount of money you're paying is their third-party panel,” said Skrbic-Huss. “I knew at that time I didn't need a third-party panel and I was spending a lot of money for something I was not going to be utilizing since we were planning on only communicating with our own customers.”

Inefficient for recruitment

In June 2021, Zumbro joined the team to lead Procare’s UX research practice. Her first job was to grow their panel in UserTesting. While some progress was made, the process was painful and impossible to scale.

Like Skrbc-Huss, Zumbro realized they weren’t getting their money’s worth because they simply didn’t need the third-party panel. She also had a hard time getting in-touch with their own customers – the reason they stuck around in the first place.

"It was really hard because I kept on talking to the same customers over and over again,” said Zumbro. “I couldn't see who was getting emailed. I just got to choose the persona that I wanted to reach out to that was a part of our community, and then it would send out batches. It was really frustrating because people wouldn't respond because emails came from UserTesting.” 

Zumbro also experienced limitations with UserTesting’s research calendar.

“One of the biggest calendaring issues was it didn't two-way sync to my calendar, so I would have to block out huge chunks of time for it to work,” said Zumbro. “Nobody could put time on my calendar because it wouldn’t update my availability.”

This made it difficult to coordinate her schedule with designers and product managers – a must-have feature for involving cross-functional stakeholders in research.

Hard to share insights

Calendaring wasn’t the only reason Skrbic-Huss and Zumbro found UserTesting made it difficult to get their team members involved with research. Access to the tool itself was hardly inclusive.

“We only had two people who were technically allowed to log into UserTesting, so Brenna and I were the only people who were allowed to access the research,” said Skrbic-Huss.

Sharing insights with their team wasn’t exactly a smooth process either.

With their research challenges mounting, Skrbic-Huss and Zumbro began exploring other options. That’s when they discovered Great Question.

Research outcomes at Procare Solutions with Great Question

$15,000 in savings per year

By switching to Great Question, Procare Solutions saved $15,000 per year without sacrificing product functionality. In fact, Great Question has empowered them to do much more – both on their own and with support as needed.

7 hours saved per month on recruitment

Zumbro has been thrilled with the speed and flexibility Great Question has brought to her research recruitment.

“I really like how I can choose to blast out 100 recruitment emails all at once if I need a really quick turnaround time or I can send this out to five people every 2 hours,” said Zumbro. “That’s flexibility I didn't have before with UserTesting.”

Great Question’s calendar has allowed her to better sync with her team and participants to get the most out of everyone’s availability. Integrating Great Question directly with her work email has also helped her build trust with customers and avoid confusion created by UserTesting’s generic emails in the past.

This time adds up fast for a scaling research team. Last month, Zumbro saved 7 hours on research recruitment. That's 10.5 workdays worth of time she gets back per year – to further scale recruitment, focus on other areas of work, or take a well-deserved vacation.

Greater visibility & collaboration

As the leader of a cross-functional team, Skrbic-Huss loves how Great Question has helped increase access to research across the company without breaking the bank.

"In addition to the 15 grand we’re saving a year, I have a lot more licenses for our team with Great Question,” said Skrbic-Huss. “We have a lot more flexibility and different roles of tiering that allows our whole team to actually use the software.”

Procare Solutions has ten seats in Great Question with an unlimited number of people who can view across the company. Whereas UserTesting was exclusive, Great Question has proven inclusive, welcoming a mix of people from customer support, product management, marketing, and design into the platform. It’s also proven to be easier to share findings elsewhere.

This impact has not gone unnoticed. Internally, Great Question has helped people at Procare Solutions understand the importance of customer research and better utilize it in their work.

“We are able to provide our team really great insights about customers under the why – why are they doing these types of things?" said Skrbic-Huss. “I've heard from various people how nice it is to see these different types of quality information.”

Adding to the simplicity is Great Question’s suite of integrations.

“I'm always posting in our Great Question Slack channel,” said Zumbro. “It's so cool to be able to just take a snippet and send it to the product manager, and they can just click on it. It's so easy and fast.”

What's next for Procare Solutions

Currently, Procare’s research team is working on creating scorecards to better forecast and measure the impact of their work.

“Our goal is to help communicate to our executive and senior leadership teams how we're planning on removing customer pain points, which is where Great Question will really help us,” said Skrbic-Huss. “Now that we're able to track what customers are telling us, what they love and don't love, we can start using more data, metrics, and KPIs.”

It’s something they weren’t able to do before. Now that they have a unified platform for every step of their research process, they can. And they recommend you consider it, too.