When a major UK energy company wanted to bring its customers directly into two internal conferences, the brief called for more than finding people who ticked the right boxes.
They needed customers with genuine, relevant experiences. People who could talk openly about what had happened, explain the impact it had on their lives and, importantly, feel comfortable doing all of that in front of an audience of 200–300 people.
No hiding quietly at the back of a focus group for this one!
The client wanted to build on previous customer immersion work by giving more colleagues the chance to hear directly from customers and better understand what matters to them at critical moments.
We were tasked with recruiting five customers across two distinct experience groups:
But experience alone wasn’t enough.
Within the power cut sample, we needed to find people whose experiences could bring issues such as unclear or changing timescales, repeated chasing for updates, poor proactive communication and recurring disruption to life vividly into the room.
For connections customers, we were looking for experiences involving areas such as inconsistent standards, unclear points of contact, missed dates, repeated work, confusing costs or poor communication.
Across the whole group, participants needed to have been the primary person dealing with the organisation and, crucially, be confident sharing their story live with a large audience.
The recruitment approach combined customer lists with free-find recruitment, giving us more than one route into what was a tightly defined audience.
Finding the right experiences was the first filter. Finding people able to communicate those experiences clearly was the second.
Once potential participants had been identified, audition calls were built into the recruitment process. These gave the team an opportunity to check that customers were comfortable speaking about their experience, could articulate their story well and would be suited to the unusual format of the sessions.
Because when someone is standing in front of 300 people, “technically fits the screener” isn’t quite enough.
Participants also completed a 20-minute online pre-task ahead of the events, helping prepare them for the session and giving the client richer context around their experiences before they stepped into the room.
With tightly defined customer experiences, two fixed event dates and a live audience waiting at the other end, recruitment needed a little contingency built in.
The project schedule included an early recruitment review to assess progress and decide whether fallback routes were needed, alongside time for replacement recruitment following the audition stage.
That meant potential recruitment challenges could be dealt with while there was still room to manoeuvre, rather than discovering them when everyone was already reaching for the conference lanyards.
The final customer sessions were designed to move customer experience away from charts, scores and second-hand summaries and into something much more immediate: real people telling real stories.
By carefully recruiting participants not only for what they had experienced, but for their ability to confidently bring those experiences to life, the research gave colleagues the opportunity to hear directly from the people behind the customer journey.
