UserTesting, which provides customer experience insights, said it has acquired User Interviews, a platform for recruiting people for user and market research as well as AI training.
The move brings together two complementary companies that have multiple joint customers. UserTesting and User Interviews appeal to designers, researchers, product managers and marketers.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
UserTesting provides an insights platform and a global general population network. User Interviews has a premium participant marketplace. UserTesting CEO Eric Johnson said the companies together will make it easier to recruit the right participants for feedback across multiple industries and research use cases. The combined offering will also be able to ground AI deployments, products, marketing and customer experience efforts with real human insights.
"By bringing UserTesting and User Interviews together, we’re creating the fastest and most reliable way for teams to understand their customers and make better, smarter decisions with confidence," said Johnson.
User Interviews CEO Basel Fakhoury said combining the company's panel capabilities with UserTesting's platform will be a win for enterprises and joint customers looking for customer insights.
The combined company reckons that it will have more reach, precise targeting and matching, proprietary fraud detection, scale and enterprise-grade trust.
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Constellation Insights caught up with Johnson and Fakhoury to talk shop. Here are the takeaways.
The rationale behind the deal. Johnson said he has been meeting with customers since taking over as CEO in September 2024. The one feedback that kept coming back was to find the right participants to deliver the right feedback. "This acquisition is incredibly strategic. Our customers said the one thing they need is they need the right participants to get the feedback right," said Johnson. "They need the right human beings. In many cases, the customer actually wants a B2B professional. It could be a doctor, lawyer or developer. It's a really bespoke person and those people are not the easiest to find."
User Interviews had built a platform that can deliver those bespoke people. "What we're doing is we're bringing together the best overall customer insights company and general population panel with the best company on Earth to go out and find these hard to find people," said Johnson.
Johnson and Fakhoury began talking roughly a year ago about partnerships. Over time it became clear that customers and employees thought a merger made sense.
Finding the right panel participants. Fakhoury said User Interviews has built a platform that has a broad number of people with specific characteristics. To reach those people, email doesn't work. "SMB owners or doctors are generally not in these networks. If you get emailed to participate in a study, and then you don't get selected for that study, you're not going to apply to the next one. It's just not worth it," said Fakhoury. "We've invested in the matching algorithms so that when someone launches a project we send it to the people most likely to qualify. The participants end up trusting us. That matching technology is really our differentiation. We think about the participant experience. It's a virtuous cycle."
"We built this network and these flywheels that I think are really hard to reproduce, and that's allowed us to be very efficient at what we've done," added Fakhoury.
Feedback fatigue and delivering value. Johnson and Fakhoury both noted that the survey and feedback fatigue is real. That's why finding the right people, paying them and finding the right human fit matters so much. "I didn't come from customer insights before, but entering this market, what I realized is the value of this. This is actually really hard but it is the most important part to getting rich feedback, because if you don't have the right people, no matter how great your feedback mechanisms are, no matter how great your AI is, you have nothing. And so that's why, as a company, our business strategy is to do this part exceptionally well," said Johnson.
Johnson added that the human feedback loop is critical to AI. "You start with the quality of the data you put into it. Because we have the best ability to talk to the right humans, and we have the largest volume of customers generating this kinds of feedback, we are uniquely positioned to provide the best AI, whether it's AI summarization, whether synthetic feedback, or whether it's AI simulations," said Johnson.
Constellation Research’s take
Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller assessed the deal.
“On the surface, this is a masterclass in acquisitions: an emerging player with great technology, great product and great customers gets picked up by a bigger player that can immediately accelerate technology roadmaps thanks to the great technology. The combined company can immediately offer mutual customers greater flexibility and opportunity while simultaneously taking advantage of new customer opportunities. The fit feels obvious here.
Below the surface is where this acquisition gets interesting because as many have pointed out, we are in this age of AI where brands can and should access intelligence about the market, product, or customer in a moment. The problem remains that these insights systems are already running out of the data needed to continue to make contextual decisions well. We need new and more valued sources of insight. And we can’t wait for traditional focus groups or even modern paths to synthetic data to get the job done. We want and need humans in THIS loop. We can analyze all the data in the world with AI, but human-centric panels and opportunities for interview-based insights takes customer-driven decisioning to a whole new level. That’s what UserTesting + User Interviews can offer: accelerated access to humans to ensure that human-in-the-loop decisioning isn’t just possible, it's easy. “
