How Pollinate decreased research report turnaround by 65% and improved client retention.

The research productivity crisis

Market research is supposed to be about uncovering insights, but at Pollinate it had become mostly about making charts. A typical research project would collect thousands of survey responses or dozens of hours of qualitative interviews, all rich with potential discoveries. Then researchers would spend three days building 30-40 visualizations to communicate what they had found.

The chart creation process was pure drudgery. Export data from Qualtrics. Clean it in Excel. Calculate percentages and create pivot tables. Copy numbers into chart templates. Adjust colors and fonts to match client branding. Fix labels and legends. Export to PowerPoint. Repeat 40 times. By the time the visualization work was done, researchers barely remembered what insights had excited them during the initial analysis.

Clients were not getting Pollinate's best work. The research was solid, but the analysis was surface-level because there simply was not time for deep exploration. One researcher put it bluntly: We find the obvious stuff, make it look pretty, and ship it. The really interesting patterns stay hidden because we cannot afford to look for them.

Reimagining the research workflow

The Director of Research had been thinking about this problem for months when a researcher showed him a proof of concept she had built using Lumis. She had taken a completed project and re-visualized it using AI-powered automation. The work that had originally taken three days took her 45 minutes. More importantly, with the extra time she had explored the data more deeply and found two insights that had not made it into the original report.

That demonstration made the business case obvious. Pollinate implemented Lumis company-wide over six weeks, building templates for their standard research deliverables and connecting directly to Qualtrics and their other data sources. The training focused less on how to use the tool and more on how to take advantage of the freed-up time for better analysis.

From good research to great insights

The first projects using Lumis were revealing. Reports that had previously taken two weeks were delivered in six days—a 65% reduction in turnaround time. But the time savings were not the real story. The reports were noticeably better. Researchers were segmenting data in ways they had never had time for before, testing multiple hypotheses, and including analysis that would have been cut due to time pressure.

One client, a major CPG company, specifically called out the difference in their quarterly business review. The research had significantly more depth and contained insights we had never seen before despite working together for three years. The Pollinate team knew exactly what had changed—their researchers finally had time to do research instead of formatting.