Pulse vs Arbor

Arbor's interviews are made for feedback that people give out loud, and they can be run without a name attached, on topics such as a process that keeps failing them. Umi runs the interview with an organization's own frontline employees, managers and customers, which suits a leader who wants to hear how a process works from the people inside it. Running it anonymously suits topics where a name attached would change what people are willing to say about their manager or their workload. Participants join through a shareable link or a QR code, which lets a team post the interview on a notice at a site where staff rarely check email.

The output is written for someone who has to act. Arbor's synthesis names themes, root causes, quotes and recommended actions, which suits an operations lead who has to take a recommendation into the next review with the evidence attached, and a manager who reads it gets the reasons behind a failing process in the words of the people who deal with it.

Pulse was designed around research and insights teams whose customer studies span several markets at once. One brief can field a study across those markets, in 240+ languages, enabled on request, which suits a CX lead preparing a service change in several countries who wants to hear customers in each of them before the plan is fixed. The same lead can bring a handful of customers together in a Pulse focus group, to hear them talk the change through among themselves.

1. Name the question behind the Arbor topics. Take the topics from an Arbor customer-experience study, such as a step in the service that customers keep raising, and put the question behind them at the top of a Pulse brief, with the areas to cover, the participants it needs and a screener that admits the customers who have met that problem themselves.
2. Recruit the customers nobody has contacted. Customers the organization has never been in touch with can still take part, and their view of a process can differ from that of the customers who complain about it. Write their profile into the brief, including the business customers and experts a B2B service depends on, and Pulse recruits participants to it.
3. Share the study by link, as before. A Pulse study goes out by link as well, so it can be placed in the same emails, portals or printed notices a team used before. Where the team keeps a list of customers, such as the accounts that raised a complaint last quarter, upload that list to Pulse and invite those customers to the same study.
4. Field a question with a decision date. Choose a customer question with a decision attached, such as a service change going to the leadership team, and field it in time for that meeting, with the questions the leadership team has already asked written into the brief as areas to cover, so the answers arrive framed around what the meeting has to settle.
5. Send the findings to the managers who act. Send a Word export of the report to the managers who own the service change, with each theme and the customer quotes that support it, so they read the problem in customers' own words before the leadership meeting where the change is decided and its budget is set, and can answer questions about it there.

• Arbor alternatives