The ‘Studio by Buzzback’ platform links US research buyers, moderators, fieldwork and recruiting partners, and aims to offer on-demand access for custom online qual.

Research buyers can find moderators, submit RFPs and work with suppliers on projects within the platform.

Buzzback has partnered with User Interviews, Discuss and Recollective for Studio, with the network of partners offering services including communities, diaries, mobile ethnographies, focus groups and IDIs through the platform. The company plans to bring more partners on board this year.

Liz White, senior vice-president at Buzzback, said: “We’ve watched the quantitative side of our industry evolve and explode with great research technology (restech) solutions that push our industry forward. But there were still so many challenges with qual that just weren’t being addressed.

“We experienced this daily firsthand; the telephone game of looking for the right (or available) moderator for the project, recruiting times of two weeks when our clients needed the entire project done by then, manually coordinating the logistics of the study with all the different groups of people involved. It was, and still is, an inefficient process. In the age of Airbnb, Uber and Slack we need to push ourselves to work smarter.”