User Guide

Time to field typically ranges from a few hours to a few days, depending on incidence rate and target specifications. If a study is taking longer than expected to field, check screener pass rates on the dashboard, loosen overly tight quotas, expand age or region ranges, or for self-recruit audiences, raise the incentive. You can also create a Professional Recruit for more niche audiences. If the incidence rate is below 10%, email support@listenlabs.ai and the Recruitment Ops team can help with fielding.

Rough benchmarks (subject to incidence and incentive): general population studies usually complete within hours to one day. Targeted consumer audiences typically take one to three days. Niche professional or low-incidence audiences (specific titles in specific industries, rare conditions, narrow geos) can take five to seven days, sometimes longer. Higher incentives speed fielding; more restrictive screeners and many overlapping quotas slow it down. Fielding time also depends heavily on base size (e.g., N=50 vs. N=500). The dashboard shows live fielding progress, including completes and quota status, so teams can monitor whether a study is filling as expected.

The last 10 to 20% of fielding often slows when remaining quotas target harder-to-reach segments. From the dashboard, check which quotas are still open versus closed. Some options include: (1) relax overly tight quotas; (2) raise the incentive for the remaining segments (only for self recruit); (3) broaden recruitment filters on adjacent demographics; remove non-critical quotas entirely. For studies with many overlapping quotas, it is normal to flex one or two quotas in the final stretch to close out. Our Recruitment Ops team can help triage if fielding remains stuck.

Open the Responses tab and switch the filter from Complete to Screened out. Listen shows the screener question and answer that disqualified each respondent. Look for: a single question screening out more than 50% of traffic (the question is too tight); reject answers that are reasonable in context (loosen the qualify/disqualify mapping); or a low overall incidence (broaden demographics). A useful shortcut: ask the Research Agent which questions screened out the most people and what the common reject answers were. For multi-language studies, also check screenouts by language. In addition to checking the screeners, increasing the incentive will increase the number of completions, but may not increase the incidence rate.

Set completion and screen-out redirects in the study's settings. To pass identifiers (for example, ResponseID from Qualtrics, customer_id, or panelist_id), append them as URL parameters on the participant link and Listen captures them automatically. Add the parameter name in Config to surface it as its own column on the Responses page. See Integrating with Qualtrics.

For Listen-recruited participants, all incentives are handled. Incentives are delivered automatically once a complete is approved. For self-recruited studies, you set the value and Listen can send the gift card to the participant's email, or you can handle incentives on your own. To fund payouts, load a balance on the Usage & Billing page via + Add Balance (processed through Stripe), either ahead of time or when prompted at payout. If a participant says they didn't receive theirs, check the status on the Responses tab, and if necessary email support@listenlabs.ai with the participant ID and we'll resend. See incentives.

Listen has five analysis tabs within a study, each offering a different lens on your data. Responses shows every interview individually, ideal for watching full sessions, skimming transcripts, pulling specific quotes, or exporting your dataset. Report synthesizes findings against your original study goals for a quick, high-level read. Details gives a question-by-question view, useful for seeing how different audiences answer, comparing results across segments, or filtering on one group of interest. Chat lets you query across the entire study for bespoke analysis and generating new artifacts like slides, reels, and reports. Clips surfaces themed video moments into highlight reels to bring findings to life.

Pull clips by highlighting a quote in any transcript and clicking Add to Clip, or generate a reel by prompting the Research Agent Chat. Download off-the-shelf slide decks from the Details tab. For open-ended analysis, use Research Agent in the Chat tab to build new slide decks, fill out deck shells, create new memo reports, run segment comparisons with significance flagging, generate custom charts, surface outliers, and pull cited quotes. See Analysis 101.

Listen exports in whatever form you need: the full responses table, transcripts, and complete interview recordings from the Recruit tab; individual charts from Report or Details; and highlight reels from Clips. Files come as CSV, Excel, or video. For programmatic access, enable Listen's API / MCP server to pull data directly into your own tools. See API documentation.