Keep Listen Labs where you want its in-house researchers working with you; move to User Intuition when your team runs its own methodology and wants to price each study before fieldwork. You can start the next study in User Intuition in five minutes, without a sales call or monthly subscription, and five quality voice interviews with your own participants cost $150 in platform fees. Moving historical Listen Labs research is a separate task, so it does not need to delay your next customer decision.
User Intuition is an AI-moderated interview platform that gives research teams and agencies the depth of a senior researcher at the scale of a survey, with vetted respondents, their own methodology and evidence they can trace to the verbatim. For teams considering a switch after the Salesforce announcement, start with a live brief: a product decision, a lost deal, a messaging question, or an unresolved finding. The first study shows how that workflow fits your team.
What changes when a study moves from Listen Labs?
Three things change: how the study is priced, how deep the interview goes by default, and who owns the platform.
- Pricing you can quote. Listen Labs publishes no prices and bills a subscription with credits per participant; User Intuition charges $30 per quality voice interview, published, with no subscription. An agency can put fieldwork into a proposal line by line.
- Depth without configuring each question. In Listen Labs you choose a follow-up setting per question, from none up to 2–3 follow-ups (its docs, checked September 26, 2026, after the September 1 relaunch). User Intuition’s 20–30 minute interviews ladder 5–7 levels by default, and you decide how far the moderator probes.
- An independent vendor. Salesforce has a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs that has not yet closed. User Intuition is independent.
What stays the same: both platforms bill only for interviews that pass their quality checks, both accept your own participants, and both connect to AI assistants through an API and MCP. Your guide, screeners, and sample sources move with you.
Should I switch after the Salesforce announcement?
Switch when User Intuition’s direct access, interview approach, and project economics fit your research needs. Salesforce announced its agreement to acquire Listen Labs on September 29, 2026. Closing is expected in Salesforce’s fiscal 2027 fourth quarter, subject to customary conditions. Listen Labs’ founder says its leadership and product team will continue.
For a team that wants to purchase research independently of a broader software platform, User Intuition offers a clear starting point: create the study, choose your participants, approve the cost, and launch. Existing Listen Labs customers can do this alongside ongoing work. Our acquisition explainer covers the announcement and its implications for research buyers.
How do I launch my first User Intuition study?
Bring the decision, learning goals, and audience criteria from your next brief. User Intuition’s guided setup turns that starting point into an interview plan you can review and test before launch.
- Choose one decision. For example, identify why customers abandon onboarding or what would persuade buyers to switch providers.
- Define the relevant experience. Specify who recently faced that decision and which customer segments you need represented.
- Review the interview plan. Reuse useful questions from your existing guide, add relevant context or stimuli, and test the conversation.
- Choose recruitment and approve spend. Invite your own participants or use User Intuition’s panel; confirm specialist recruitment separately.
- Launch and inspect the evidence. Read the findings alongside supporting quotes, then review what remains unresolved.
Your existing guide is a research asset, so retain its objectives and useful wording. Adapt it where the decision or audience has changed instead of copying an old study wholesale.
The guide’s methodology carries over intact. Required questions can be pinned in order and worded verbatim, screeners and hard quotas hold the sample to plan, and monadic or sequential monadic designs run as parallel cells compared side by side. Bring the same sample sources you use today, from a customer list to Prolific, Cint / Lucid, CloudResearch, any provider via custom link or your own survey. Transcripts and screener answers export as CSV, and each client or team works in an isolated workspace whose data never trains AI models.
How do Listen Labs studies map to User Intuition?
Most Listen Labs interview studies move across directly; in-study quant modules and desktop screen-share sessions do not. Map each recurring study before you move it.
| Listen Labs study | How it runs in User Intuition |
|---|---|
| AI-moderated interview in text, voice or video | Chat, voice or video interview on your guide, 20–30 minutes, laddering 5–7 levels by default |
| Concept or message test across several stimuli | Monadic or sequential monadic cells run in parallel and compared side by side |
| Screen-share usability session | Interactive walkthrough of a prototype or live website, with the moderator asking about each step; whole-desktop observation stays on Listen Labs |
| Pulse tracker across waves | The same guide rerun wave after wave, with each wave searchable in the Customer Intelligence Hub |
| Research Library questions across past studies | Exported transcripts uploaded to the Customer Intelligence Hub and queried alongside new studies |
| Ranking, MaxDiff with TURF or Gabor-Granger inside the study | No in-study quant module; keep these on Listen Labs or field them in your survey tool |
| Your own participants | Customer lists, Prolific, Cint / Lucid, CloudResearch or any provider through a custom link |
| Panel recruitment | A 4M+ vetted panel across 58 countries, where a person reviews every panelist before acceptance; specialist audiences are recruited to order, and timing follows incidence |
When should you keep Listen Labs?
Keep Listen Labs for the studies that depend on what it does and User Intuition does not. A partial move is a reasonable outcome.
- You want researchers on the work. Listen Labs pairs its software with in-house senior researchers and white-glove service.
- The audience is hard to reach. It offers managed recruitment for specialist healthcare, under-1%-incidence and C-suite targets.
- The study needs quant inside the interview. Ranking, MaxDiff with TURF, matrix questions and Gabor-Granger pricing tests run in the same Listen Labs study.
- You need a language outside User Intuition’s 80+. Listen Labs advertises 120+ languages and variants, with 40+ under voice moderation in its FAQ.
- Procurement requires a completed audit today. Listen Labs states SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance; on User Intuition, the SOC 2 Type II examination is underway.
- Your company is standardizing on Salesforce. After the deal closes, Listen Labs sits inside a relationship you already manage.
How will interview depth and research quality change?
User Intuition’s AI-moderated interviews use adaptive laddering to explore the reasons behind an answer. The moderator follows the participant’s experience from a product attribute to its practical consequences and personal importance. That helps a researcher understand which benefit matters and why, rather than receiving a list of preferences.
In Listen Labs, the researcher sets follow-up depth per question and can add probing instructions. User Intuition’s moderator ladders 5–7 levels by default and develops depth during the conversation, following unexpected explanations as well as the planned learning goals. Researchers retain control of the study’s purpose, and decide how far the moderator probes, without scripting every possible branch.
User Intuition also checks each interview against the brief for Length, Depth, and Coverage before billing. Interviews that fail those checks are not charged. Evidence review then assesses what the usable interviews support, which gaps matter to the decision, and whether the next step is deeper analysis or targeted follow-up interviews. Explore the Walmart study and sample presentation to see the findings and recommended next research steps.
How fast can we run research, and at what scale?
User Intuition returns 200+ panel interviews in 24 hours; with your own participants, interviews run in parallel as they respond. There is no platform-imposed hourly interview cap. Increasing volume does not require scheduling a moderator for each session.
Recruitment and participant availability determine how quickly the required sample completes. User Intuition supports your own participants and a 4M+ vetted panel across 58 countries, and interviews run in 80+ languages. For an agency, that means separate client studies can run in parallel; for a research team, it means a follow-up can begin when the question is ready. See the Listen Labs comparison for the complete setup-to-findings comparison.
What will the next study cost?
User Intuition charges $30 per quality voice interview, with no required subscription. Start with five interviews and budget recruitment separately:
| Cost | Your own participants | Standard panel recruitment |
|---|---|---|
| Five quality voice interviews | $150 | $150 |
| Recruiting cost | Your own recruitment and incentives | 5 × $30 |
| Total platform and standard recruiting fees | $150 | $300 |
| Required monthly subscription | None | None |
Incentives you arrange for your own participants are additional; specialist audiences require a recruiting quote. Five interviews are a practical starting purchase. User Intuition’s evidence review helps identify whether additional research would address a meaningful gap.
A buyer reported a Listen Labs quote in April 2026 of roughly $20,000 annually plus $300–$400 per session. That example totals $35,000–$40,000 for 50 sessions: the annual base plus 50 session fees. Fifty User Intuition quality voice interviews cost $1,500 in platform fees, or $3,000 including standard panel recruitment.
Use your current Listen Labs agreement to account for its included services, recruitment, and remaining commitments. The Listen Labs pricing guide explains the historical quote and current buying model. For the transition budget, add the first User Intuition study and your team’s export and setup work; calculate savings from spending you can avoid after renewal.
How do I preserve my existing Listen Labs research?
Keep a usable archive of the source evidence and the context needed to interpret it. Listen Labs lets you export complete responses yourself from the Recruit tab: zip files with transcripts in the original language and English, the responses table, and full interview videos. Its API documentation also describes retrieving responses and transcripts. Download study assets while you have account access, then verify that the files open and contain the expected responses.
Save these together for each study:
- Responses and transcripts: the original evidence behind the findings, plus available recordings.
- Brief, guide, and screener: the purpose, questions, and qualification criteria.
- Sample details: relevant segments, recruitment source, fieldwork dates, and exclusions.
- Reports and presentation files: the deliverables stakeholders already use.
Retain your own participant contact details only where you have permission to use them. For a new study, confirm participants still meet its criteria. Once the archive is saved, upload the exported transcripts to User Intuition’s Customer Intelligence Hub so past findings sit next to new studies and can be queried from the first project. Check the permissions attached to each source file before you upload it.
How do I move the team over without disrupting active studies?
Finish work already in progress and use the next study to establish the new workflow. Give one person responsibility for the archive, renewal dates, and communication with stakeholders. The timing follows your active studies and contract, rather than a fixed migration schedule.
Share the first User Intuition readout with the people who will use it. Show the supporting interview evidence, actual study cost, elapsed time, and recommended follow-up. Research operations can then decide which recurring studies to move, while finance separates new project spending from existing contractual commitments.
For agencies, keep client briefs and deliverables clearly organized and move one project at a time. A team that values Listen Labs’ in-house researchers can keep them on those projects while using User Intuition for studies it wants to run directly.
Start with your next research question. Run five quality voice interviews from $150 with your own participants; participant incentives are separate. Create your first study →
Can I run the next study through an AI tool?
User Intuition’s first-class API and MCP workflows let researchers operate the study through their AI tools: prepare the plan, estimate recruitment, approve the launch, retrieve findings and their sources, and draft the next brief. This reduces handoffs while retaining the team’s control of the research purpose and budget.
Keep Listen Labs for projects where its in-house researchers add value; move the projects that benefit from direct setup and evidence-led follow-up.