Use this template to scope AI-moderated qualitative research inside an agency or consulting engagement. Replace every placeholder with a decision, audience, or deliverable that your team can verify.
1. State the decision and learning goals
Decision: [What will the client decide, and by when?]
Learning goals: [What evidence would change that decision?]
Scope: [Which markets, customer groups, products, or experiences are included?]
Avoid promising to answer every business question in one study. Define the first decision clearly and identify any questions that may require a separate method or follow-up wave.
2. Preserve the research method
Explain who writes and approves the discussion guide, how follow-up questions work, and how the research team will evaluate coverage. State which parts use AI moderation and where a human researcher remains responsible.
With User Intuition, agencies, consulting firms, and research teams can preserve their methodology and use their own sample. AI moderation follows the approved guide with adaptive probing. The agency retains interpretation and the final recommendation.
Specify limitations that matter to the decision: retrospective recall, self-selection, sample composition, and any small segments. A larger interview count does not by itself make qualitative findings representative of a market.
3. Define the sample and recruitment path
Audience: [Eligibility, geography, language, and relevant experience.]
Sample source: [Client list, User Intuition panel, or a documented combination.]
Target quality interviews: [Count and segment requirements.]
Recruiting assumptions: [Availability, incidence, incentives, and the contingency if the audience is difficult to reach.]
User Intuition has a 4M participant panel. Standard recruitment and specialist audiences have different commercial conditions. Confirm feasibility before committing to a difficult segment or a fixed completion date.
4. Describe the deliverable and review process
List the outputs the client will receive: findings, participant evidence, a presentation, and any agreed supporting materials. Explain how researchers will verify quotations, investigate counterexamples, and distinguish observations from recommendations.
Use the sample calls and presentation from our 43-participant Walmart shopper study to show the format. Download the PDF and agree the final deliverables with your client.
State the number of review rounds and who approves the final readout. If the initial evidence is inconclusive, define whether a follow-up recommendation or additional fieldwork is included. Specify whether each review covers factual corrections, interpretation, or both. For example, the research lead can approve the evidence trail while the engagement partner approves the recommendation. Record a due date for each review and name who consolidates client feedback, so parallel comments become one clear set of revisions.
5. Quote platform costs and agency services
For 30 quality Starter voice interviews, User Intuition costs $900 with your own sample or $1,800 with standard panel recruitment. Starter has no monthly fee. Specialty audiences are quoted separately; incentives you arrange for your own participants are additional.
Your client fee also covers the design, review, interpretation, and delivery work you agree to provide. Set that fee using your own scope and economics. The platform price is not a suggested resale price. Link to current pricing in internal scoping notes and use the agency margin model to test assumptions.
6. Set a conditional timeline
Separate guide approval, recruitment, fieldwork, analysis, and client review. Interviews can run in parallel, but completion still depends on participant availability and the audience. Plan additional time for specialist recruitment, difficult evidence, and client revisions.
Close the proposal with the decisions needed to start: approved learning goals, sample requirements, guide owner, budget, and client reviewer. A clear handoff reduces delays more reliably than a universal turnaround promise.
An example of turning a broad brief into a research scope
Suppose a client says, ‘We need to understand why customers are leaving.’ That is a useful business concern, but it does not yet define the people to interview or the decision the study must support. Ask whether the client is deciding how to improve onboarding, change the proposition, address a service problem, or prioritize retention work. The answer shapes the sample and guide.
A more specific proposal might investigate recent customers who left after their first renewal opportunity, with the aim of identifying the experiences that shaped their decision. The guide can reconstruct the relationship, examine expectations and alternatives, and ask for concrete examples. The proposal should still avoid promising to prove causation from retrospective accounts. It can identify explanations and hypotheses that the client can evaluate alongside other evidence.
Write the deliverable in terms of that decision: the observed reasons for leaving, the variation across relevant customer groups, contradictory accounts, and recommended next steps. If the client needs a population estimate of how common each reason is, explain what additional design would be needed. A qualitative interview study can inform the next measurement step without being sold as a substitute for it.
Adapt the template to different methods
For concept testing, describe how participants encounter the concept and when they are asked to compare alternatives. Preserve the distinction between an initial reaction and a response prompted by a follow-up question. Explain how the team will review credibility, relevance, barriers, and trade-offs. If several concepts are tested, consider order effects and the burden on participants rather than assuming that adding concepts leaves the study unchanged.
For competitive research, define the decision or purchase experience the participant should reconstruct. A broad discussion of brands differs from an interview with someone who recently chose between specific options. Explain why the selected participants can speak to the client’s question. The proposed output should distinguish reported reasons, observed patterns in the sample, and the agency’s interpretation of the competitive implications.
For multi-market work, specify the language, audience, and recruiting assumptions for each market. Parallel interviewing can reduce scheduling work, but it does not guarantee identical recruitment timing. Explain how the guide will remain comparable, how local context will be reviewed, and whether findings will be reported separately before drawing cross-market conclusions. Include a plan for an underfilled market rather than concealing that dependency inside one global deadline.
For internal stakeholder research, identify which organizational perspectives are required and how findings will be reviewed in context. Employees, managers, and leaders may have different access to information and different reasons for participating. Keep the proposal focused on the evidence required for the engagement and the practical arrangements needed to collect it. Sensitive conversations may still call for direct consultant involvement.
Make the approval process usable
Name a client reviewer for the learning goals and discussion guide, and identify who can authorize scope changes. The proposal should not require every stakeholder to approve every operational step, but it should make material decisions visible. A clear owner helps the agency distinguish a request that improves the agreed study from a request that creates a new one.
Set out what the agency needs from the client before fieldwork: approved materials, participant eligibility, a usable contact source if applicable, and any background context necessary to interpret the findings. Record the effect of a delayed approval or incomplete input on the schedule. This makes the timeline a shared operating agreement rather than a one-sided promise.
For the readout, agree who will attend and what they need to decide. A working session with the project team requires a different level of detail from an executive summary. Specify which formats are included and which are optional. Showing the sample presentation helps the client understand the format, but the agency still needs to define its own deliverable and review obligations.
Review the proposal before sending it
Read the proposal once as the business sponsor and once as the research lead. The sponsor should understand the decision, investment, timetable, and expected use of the findings. The research lead should be able to assess the method, sample, guide, evidence review, and limitations. If either reader needs to infer an important commitment, make it explicit.
Check that cost examples use the selected sample path and modality. Do not carry a standard consumer-panel estimate into a specialist audience without checking feasibility. Verify that the agency’s services and any buyer-arranged incentives are included wherever the proposal presents a complete project total. A platform-only number should be labeled as such.
Finally, ask whether the delivery team could use the approved proposal as its workplan. The brief should identify what must be true before launch, what the researchers will inspect during analysis, and what makes the deliverable complete. If it describes only a desirable outcome and a fee, add the operating detail needed to make that outcome reviewable.
Keep the approved version with the study brief so researchers and client reviewers can refer to the same scope when questions arise during fieldwork or delivery.
Inspect the workflow before your next client brief
Hear actual calls and see the sample presentation from a 43-participant Walmart shopper example. The two call recordings, transcripts, and 15-slide readout let you assess probing depth, traceability, and how study limits are communicated. The presentation download is a PDF.
Use the agency research page for client-delivery workflows, the consulting page for engagement research, or the insights-team page for internal research programs. Bring one real brief to the evaluation. Agree the decision, sample requirements, guide, cost basis, and review standard before launching.