Picture this: you’re in a meeting about an upcoming product release that will launch in a couple of months. The product is almost feature-complete, which means it’s just about ready for beta testing. Someone — maybe it’s your boss or someone from a different department — starts talking about recruitment. “This product has a lot of features,” they say. “Let’s get 200 people to test this and give feedback.”
200? As the person charged with running a beta test, your head is already starting to hurt. It’s hard enough to get 50 testers to participate, let alone 200 people to find, qualify, and recruit. And there’s only a handful of weeks. You start thinking about the hundreds of emails you’ll need to send, the contact lists to dig up. When was the last time you pinged your tester community? Maybe you can get some friends or family to join? What’s Uncle Roy been up to these days?
Recruitment is one of the hardest challenges for organizations when it comes to real-world product testing. Getting enough target market testers who both fit the criteria you need for a full assessment of your product’s performance and who are guaranteed to provide enough feedback seems like an impossible task — especially when deadlines are looming and you’re already so limited on time.
At Centercode, challenging recruitments are our bread and butter. Thanks to our network of 250,000+ willing testers and two decades of developing best practices, we’re equipped to take down obstacles that stand between you and increasing the quality and usability of your product. Whether it’s stringent tester criteria, a history of low engagement, or time constraints, we’ve got you covered.
Here’s how Centercode handles the 3 biggest challenges in beta test recruitment.
Challenge 1: Finding Enough Target Market Testers
Securing high-quality pre-release product insights starts with securing the right testers: people in your target market who are eager to hunt down bugs and share their product impressions. You also need the right number of testers to ensure your findings are statistically significant.
These two dimensions are challenging on their own, but together, they’re downright exhausting, especially if you don’t have a tester community of your own or your community has little to no engagement. Your trouble doubles when you’re up against complex tester criteria, like making sure your testers have certain smart products in their homes already, live in a certain area or have a specific amount of square footage, or fit a niche demographic.
The Centercode Difference: Test Platforms
Centercode’s tester network, Betabound, connects you to over 250,000 pre-profiled users. Our users’ profiles are updated consistently so you know what’s in their tech stack, from their phone model and its OS, to their TV and the streaming devices they use, to their wearables, home speakers, and more. No matter how specific you need to be, we have the connections to get your product into the hands of as many people from your target market as you require.
Challenge 2: Ensuring Engaged and Effective Testers
Nothing is so disappointing as spending literal hours building out surveys and sending hundreds of emails, only to get a handful of valuable feedback in return. Wasted effort aside, are you willing to risk sending out thousands of dollars worth of units — some of which you may get back — on nothing but a promise of good faith that you’ll see high-quality product insights?
The Centercode Difference: Vetted Testers
Screening for enthusiastic and committed testers is another aspect of recruitment that causes headaches and heartache. Even if your testers seem eager and excited in their application, it’s hard to guarantee that energy will stay throughout the course of your project. Centercode uses proven best practices to weed out the duds, vets testers across projects with user scoring, and keeps tabs on the high performers. This enables us to guarantee 90% participation on every test.
Challenge 3: Doing It All When You’re Short on Time
Time deficits are a chronic affliction for professionals in the Customer Validation industry. For one, beta testing comes at the end of the production schedule, meaning delays in design, engineering, and manufacturing push back the time available to test. For another, nearly 80% of professionals who manage beta tests are doing so amid other job responsibilities. Take the disruption of Covid-19 and a wounded workforce into account, and time for thorough and strategic recruitment is now more limited than ever.
The Centercode Difference: Always Ready
The saying doesn’t just apply to the U.S. Coast Guard. Centercode is uniquely equipped to spin up recruitments and effective beta tests on a tight timeline. With skilled resources, a thriving tester community, and best-practice reinforced processes, working with Centercode shaves weeks off of recruitment — time you can devote to polishing your product with customer-validated recommendations.
How Can We Help You?
If you’re squaring off against any of these challenges, you don’t have to do it alone. Centercode is in your corner. Talk to us about how our tester network and recruitment solutions fit your specific product and program needs.
