Working with Layla is like having a secret weapon that helps put your insight into high gear…
Layla is one of the best strategic partners we’ve had the opportunity to engage with our clients. She has the unique ability to gather insights from our intended audience and help distill the insights into actionable strategies.
Upwords under the direction of Layla Shea has provided the most actionable customer insights we have seen to date. We went into this engagement thinking traditional focus groups would deliver the best results. Layla respectfully challenged that position, recommending a mobile enabled, online qualitative panel. Trusting her expertise, we pursued the recommendation. The outcome exceeded our expectations.
Upwords is seriously smart, hardworking and great to deal with. We love how they are actively innovating and integrating new tools, designs and technology (like smartphone qualitative) into their practice. That means they’re applying the best methodology (traditional or non) to match each client, project and insight need. A true insight pioneer and a great partner.
Layla is one of the best researchers (and frankly one of the best people) I have ever worked with. She strikes a great balance between outstanding research knowledge and a brilliant strategic mind.
If you start your project with a meaty consumer problem, Layla is extremely creative in thinking about different ways into it and leveraging all the new technology-based tools, with purpose. She’s creative in her approach but more importantly, savvy on the back-end reporting of the insights. Really enjoy working with her and she brings great value and a great brain to each and every project.
Every year our small business has surveyed our top customers with a simple online survey and we usually received predictable responses. We knew we needed to dig deeper to answer the questions we had been struggling with in order to grow and improve our business. Layla and Bronwen knew how to do this digging – who to talk to, what questions to ask, and how to analyze the results to get actionable insights. Now, we’ve got this qualitative data from real clients guiding us along a path forward – instead of us trying to predict where to turn next. For us, conducting qualitative research with Upwords has been an incredibly insightful process, and Layla and Bronwen were a delight to work with.
I worked with Upwords on a complicated project trying to get insights on a mature category that has been struggling for several years. Previous efforts net the same insights over and over that didn’t help my client move forward with a differentiated approach. The challenge to the Upwords team was to identify new insights. Layla was so great to work with because she was able to translate our needs into some very interesting exercises that seemed unorthodox but provided us with great results and amazing new learnings. The Upwords approach was very innovative and Layla’s ability to dig deep as a moderator and get the types of insights we needed to be able to help the brand see the way to the future with a truly differentiated approach. Thank you Layla and Bronwen for a job well done.