Consumer Product Testing Recruitment with Olivia

Good product decisions depend on feedback from the right consumers. Whether you are running a central location test, a home-use trial, or a sensory evaluation, the quality of your results starts with who you recruit. Olivia gives you the tools to find, screen, schedule, and manage consumer testers from start to finish, so your team spends less time on logistics and more time gathering actionable insight.

Organizing Your Test

Every product test has items to evaluate and formats in which to evaluate them. Olivia captures both:

  • Products for items under test: Each SKU, variant, formulation, or packaging design becomes a product. Testing three flavors of a new beverage? Create "Citrus Burst", "Berry Blend", and "Tropical Wave" as products. Comparing two packaging concepts against the current design? Each concept is its own product. Every product gets independent recruitment tracking, so you always know exactly where each variant stands.
  • Modes for testing formats: Define the type of evaluation as a mode. A 30-minute central location taste test, a 15-minute online survey follow-up, and a 7-day home-use trial can all exist in the same project. Each mode carries its own duration, which flows into PDF invitations and scheduling.

This flexibility means a single Olivia project can handle a multi-phase study: recruit consumers for an in-person taste test on Monday, send them home with product samples, and schedule a follow-up survey for the following week, all tracked under one roof.

Profiling the Right Consumers

Consumer product tests live or die by sample quality. Recruiting heavy coffee drinkers for a tea study or brand loyalists when you need switchers wastes time and budget. Olivia's screening questions let you capture exactly the criteria you need:

  • Single choice questions for structured profiling: purchase frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, rarely), preferred brands, age bracket, household size, dietary restrictions, or price sensitivity. Predefined answer options keep data clean and consistent across your entire recruiting team.
  • Open text questions for nuanced detail: favorite product in the category, reasons for brand switching, specific dietary needs, or a description of typical usage occasions.

Required questions guarantee completeness. If a recruiter skips a critical field, the respondent profile cannot be saved. This matters when you discover mid-project that half your sample is missing income data.

Short versions of questions pull double duty. Set the short version of "What is your incentive for participating?" to Incentive, and you can use {{Incentive}} as a placeholder in PDF invitations to print each tester's specific compensation amount. The same short version becomes a clean column header in Excel exports instead of the full question text.

Your entire question set can be exported and imported between projects. If you run regular product tests in the same category, your screening questionnaire carries over in seconds.

Building the Testing Schedule

Product tests come in many shapes. A central location test might need 200 back-to-back 20-minute appointments across two days. A home-use trial might need 50 pickup slots on a single morning. Olivia handles both extremes:

  • Excel import for volume: Download a project-specific template, enter your dates, times, and modes, and upload. Two hundred slots across four days can be set up in minutes. Copy a row, change the date, and repeat. If a mode name in the Excel file does not exist yet, Olivia creates it automatically.
  • Form-based creation for precision: When certain slots need to be restricted to specific products, use the form. Create 15 slots for "Citrus Burst" on Tuesday afternoon and 15 for "Berry Blend" on Wednesday morning, each restricted so recruiters can only book the correct variant.

Combine both methods freely. Use Excel for the bulk of your schedule and the form for slots with special product restrictions. Named slots like "Station 3 - Afternoon" help recruiters and on-site staff identify sessions at a glance.

Blocked slots let you hold capacity in reserve. Create them as blocked and release them later if recruitment for a specific product is ahead of schedule and you need to reallocate.

Controlling Recruitment Volume with Quotas

Consumer product tests need balanced samples. If you are comparing three flavors, you need roughly equal representation for each, not 80% of your sample tasting one variant. Olivia's quota system prevents this:

  • Target quota: The number of completed evaluations you need per product and mode. If your analysis plan calls for 60 consumers tasting each flavor, set the target to 60.
  • Total quota: Add an over-recruitment buffer to cover no-shows and cancellations. A total of 70 when your target is 60 gives you a comfortable 17% buffer.
  • Open quota: Starts at the total and decreases with every booking. When it hits zero, that product-mode combination is full. Recruiters automatically see only products and slots that still have availability.

Because quotas are tracked per product and per mode, you have granular control. Maybe your taste test needs 60 per flavor, but the follow-up survey only needs 40. Different quotas, same project, no confusion.

Scaling Recruitment Across Your Team

Product tests often recruit fast and hard. Multiple recruiters working phone lists, field teams intercepting shoppers at a mall, or agencies recruiting across different cities. Olivia keeps this coordinated:

  • Concurrent booking without conflicts: Database-level slot locking means two recruiters can never book the same slot. When one selects a slot, it is temporarily held. If a second recruiter tries the same slot, they are redirected to pick another. No phone calls to check availability, no shared spreadsheets with conflicting entries.
  • Three-step booking flow: Select the product, pick a slot, enter the name. The streamlined process matters when you are recruiting 200 consumers in a week.
  • Respondent status tracking: After booking, each consumer's status is visible and color-coded on the dashboard. Green for confirmed, yellow for those requesting a change, red for cancellations. If a consumer drops out and you need to free the slot, an administrator can delete the respondent record, which resets the slot to open status so a replacement can be booked.

Administrators can reassign bookings between recruiters if needed, and bulk operations let admins update up to 50 matching slots at once for schedule changes, mode adjustments, or product reassignments.

Keeping Recruiters Informed

When project details change, everyone needs to know before their next booking. Olivia's project messages let administrators post a formatted notice directly on the booking page. Updated screening criteria, a product pulled from the test, a venue change: the message appears before the recruiter selects a product, ensuring nobody books based on outdated information.

Messages support rich text formatting (bold, headings, lists) and are versioned, so you have a record of what was communicated and when.

Generating Invitation Letters

For each booked consumer, generate a PDF invitation from a customizable template. The WYSIWYG editor handles formatting, and your company or client logo sits in the header. Dynamic placeholders fill in automatically per respondent:

  • {{respondent}} and {{salutation}} for personalized addressing (with gender-specific salutation options)
  • {{product}} for the specific item they will evaluate
  • {{appointment}} and {{duration}} for when and how long
  • {{address}} for mailing if needed
  • {{recruiter}} for the name of who recruited them
  • {{QRCode}} for fast on-site check-in
  • Custom placeholders from screening questions, such as {{Incentive}} or {{Location}}

Paper size (A4 or Letter) and language (English or German) are configurable. Export the template and import it into your next project to avoid rebuilding it from scratch.

Managing Test-Day Operations

On the day of the test, Olivia's Study Live dashboard becomes your operational command center:

  • Check-in table: All consumers expected within your chosen time window (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hours). Color-coded rows make urgency visible at a glance. Red means the consumer is late. Yellow means they are due within 15 minutes. White means they are further out. Late rows include the exact delay (e.g., "7 min late") so you can decide when to call or move to the next tester.
  • Check-out table: All consumers currently on-site with elapsed time since check-in. For timed evaluations, this tells you at a glance who is running long and who is nearly done.
  • QR code scanning: Consumers show the QR code from their invitation. A camera scan checks them in with no typing, no searching, and no reception bottleneck. The same scan checks them out when they leave.
  • Labels for tracking: Assign a tester number or station ID at check-in (e.g., "T-042" or "Station 5") for matching consumers to evaluation stations, samples, or recordings.
  • No-show handling: Mark absent consumers from the dashboard. The slot status updates, the clinic statistics recalculate, and you know immediately whether you need to pull from your over-recruitment buffer.

Auto-refresh runs every 30 seconds, keeping the view current for reception staff and test supervisors without any manual action.

Tracking Progress in Real Time

Olivia's statistics give you a live picture of your test at every stage:

  • Recruiting status table: Target, gross, current, and open counts per product and mode. If "Tropical Wave" is at 85% while "Citrus Burst" is at 50%, you know exactly where to direct recruiting effort.
  • Clinic status: Once testing begins, this shows show, no-show, and screened-out counts per product with a chance percentage. A product with 12 confirmed testers out of a target of 60 and 50 still open has an 83% chance, giving you confidence that sufficient testers are scheduled.
  • Recruitment timeline: Bookings over time grouped by product. Spot the day recruitment slowed down and correlate it with recruiter availability or external factors.
  • Mode mix over time: See how bookings distribute across testing formats. Useful when a project combines central location and home-use phases.
  • Recruiting efficiency: Time-to-book and lead time metrics. If lead times are getting shorter, you may be recruiting too close to the test date, increasing no-show risk.
  • Recruiter throughput and leaderboard: Bookings and show rates per recruiter. Identify top performers and address low show rates before they affect your sample size.
  • Target forecast: Projects when each product will reach its target based on 7-day and 14-day booking averages. If the forecast says you will miss your deadline, you can add recruiters or extend the schedule before it is too late.

Exporting Data for Analysis and Compensation

Export everything to a styled Excel file with one click. The export includes tester name, contact details, gender, date of birth, product evaluated, testing mode, appointment date and time, slot status, respondent status, check-in and check-out timestamps, calculated on-site duration, all screening answers, recruiter name, label, and notes.

This export feeds directly into analysis workflows. Match tester profiles to evaluation scores, verify attendance for incentive payments, or provide a complete participant summary to your client. Admins get the full project view including admin notes; recruiters get only their own completed bookings.

Working as a Team

Add as many team members as your project needs. There are no limits on team size, which matters for large-scale consumer tests with distributed recruiting teams:

  • Owners have full project control including deletion.
  • Administrators manage the project setup, slots, quotas, questions, invitations, and team members. They see all bookings and statistics.
  • Recruiters focus on booking consumers and managing their own respondent profiles. They cannot access project settings or other recruiters' data.

Invite members by email. Those with existing Olivia accounts join immediately. New users are guided through account creation and land in your project ready to recruit.

Olivia takes the coordination overhead out of consumer product testing. Your recruiting team books consumers into the right slots for the right products without conflicts. Your on-site team checks testers in and out with QR codes instead of clipboards. Your project managers see recruitment and attendance data in real time instead of waiting for end-of-day reports. The result is a cleaner sample, a smoother test day, and faster time to insight.