Joining your session
As your upcoming sessions approach, we'll send you reminder emails to get you prepared. You'll get a reminder the day before a session as well as 15 minutes before.
You can join the session either from your meeting software of choice, the meeting link in the calendar invitation, the meeting link in the reminder emails, or from the Sessions page of your study—either from the banner that appears at the top of the page, or from the session details.
If you have yet to add a meeting link to a session when you receive the reminder emails, please add one ASAP. Participants can access the meeting link 10 minutes prior to the start time, so be sure to have your meeting link added before then.
Using the Zoom or Microsoft Integration
While setting up your study, you can opt to use our Zoom or Microsoft integration instead of manually adding your meeting link(s). The integration allows Lyssna to automatically generate a unique Zoom or Teams meeting link for each session that's booked in your study.
If you have a paid plan with Zoom, Lyssna can also automatically fetch and upload session video recordings. You can find out more information about this feature in our Zoom integration article.
Last minute changes or issues
If you are conducting a session with a Lyssna panelist and are experiencing issues joining your session, are running a little late, need to change the meeting link at the last minute, or otherwise need to pass information on to the participant, send us a message from the chat bubble in the bottom right corner of your Lyssna account. We will attempt to pass the information on to the panelist but cannot guarantee that they will receive it in time.
If a Lyssna panelist attempts to join your session and you have been unable to attend, the participant will still be paid and you will not be eligible for a refund. You may attempt to reschedule with the participant, but if they decline or do not respond to the request, they will still be paid and you will not be eligible for a refund.
For privacy reasons, we cannot provide you with a Lyssna panelist's personal contact information.
During your session
Taking notes
At this time, Interviews does not support taking notes, or manually adding any other written response data from your study into your Lyssna account.
We do, however, offer AI-generated video transcription for recordings that are uploaded after your session is complete. See below for steps on how to do that.
Please take note of the limits on the amount of video and transcription storage you are allotted each month based on your plan in the table below.
Transcription is currently only offered in English.
Recording your study
Recording your session is highly recommended for your own reference as well as for quality control purposes. Session recordings will need to be done manually with the chosen meeting software you're using. Most video conferencing platforms allow for recording within the platform itself, making it easy to retain results and provide context for issues that may arise.
If using the Zoom integration, you can opt to have recordings automatically uploaded to your account when saved to the cloud. You will need to be on a paid Zoom plan to take advantage of this; otherwise, you can save your recordings to your computer and upload them manually into your Lyssna account. We currently do not support automatic uploads for our Microsoft integration, you will need to upload these manually.
We will review any session recording where an issue is reported. End the session early if necessary and contact Support with any troubles.
Best practices for conducting your interview
It can take some time lining schedules up with participants for interviews so in order to take full advantage of the sessions here are some tips:
Make sure you are on the latest version of your meeting software (if applicable) to avoid any surprise updates taking place as you try to join your session.
Have your questions well-defined and prepared before the interview takes place to ensure you have time for them all, and stay within the scheduled duration. Lyssna panelists are well within their rights to leave the session at the scheduled end time, even if you are not finished with your questions.
Refrain from asking Lyssna panelists for any personally identifiable information (full name or contact details) or any personal information that is unrelated to your interview.
Record and upload your interview to refer back to as well as to have something to provide our Support team if you need to report an issue.
For more advice on how to best conduct your interview, check out our blog post.
After your session
Uploading recorded interview and transcription
If you use the Zoom integration and are on a paid Zoom plan, you can toggle on a feature from your session details to automatically fetch the recording when uploaded to the cloud:
If you are on a free Zoom plan, using Teams, or opt to download your recordings to your computer, you can manually upload the file by clicking Upload recording. You can find it either in your session details on the Sessions page or the Recordings page of your study:
From the Recordings page, you can select any session on the left then drag and drop your recorded file or browse files to upload.
Video uploads and transcriptions are subject to storage limits based on your plan, as shown below.
Video & transcription storage limits
The amount of video file and transcription storage you have access to depends on your Lyssna plan. Limitations are as follows:
Plan | Video recordings | Transcriptions |
Free | 5GB storage | 5 hours (one-time offer) |
Basic | 50GB storage | 15 hours per month |
Pro | 500GB storage | 50 hours per month |
If you reach your storage limit, you won't be able to use that feature until storage has been opened up by deleting recordings, or in the case of transcriptions on a paid plan, when the month in your billing cycle restarts. Transcription storage does not roll over month-to-month.
Reporting issues with your study
If you run into any issues during a session with a Lyssna panelist, please reach out within 5 days of completing the session to get them resolved. After five days, the session will be automatically marked as completed, the participant will be paid, and you will not be eligible for a refund or a free replacement.
Rating a Lyssna panelist
When you mark a session with a Lyssna panelist as completed, we will ask for your feedback on that participant. We do this in order to maintain the integrity of our panel and ensure you are getting legitimate and helpful feedback for your studies.
If the panelist seemed honest, was able to understand your questions and communicate properly, but you were not fully satisfied with their participation, we ask that you mark the session as completed and give your feedback in the ratings. This ensures the participant is paid for their time, but allows our team to look into where we can help the panelist improve.
If you were happy with the panelist's participation in your study, we'd love to hear that as well!
Reporting a Lyssna panelist
For more egregious issues, you can report the panelist instead of marking the session as completed so that our team can investigate and supply you with a replacement panelist if necessary.
You can find the Report participant option in the Actions menu of your session:
Scenarios that would warrant reporting a participant might look like:
Misrepresenting their language fluency—they are unable to understand your questions or communicate their answers in a comprehensible way due to a language barrier
Misrepresenting their identity—e.g. you targeted full-time employees in the medical field for your study but the participant can't answer any questions about the medical field
Aggressive, vulgar, unprofessional, or otherwise unsociable behavior
Not using the appropriate device as stated in the requirements for the session—e.g. no webcam available, no microphone available, using mobile instead of desktop or vice versa
If any of these are obvious in the first few minutes of the session, we recommend ending the session early, reporting the participant, and sending us the recording if one is available.
Once you click Report participant, you will have the opportunity to provide your reason for reporting as well as to upload your recording—the recording is optional but will be extremely helpful as we investigate whether we need to supply a replacement participant or not.
Please allow our team up to 5 days to investigate a reported panelist, although we will usually be able to review them much quicker than that. We will typically be in touch within 24 hours after you submit your report to either ask you for more information or let you know the outcome of the investigation. If we need to source a new panelist for you, we will let you know next steps.
Reporting vs. No-show
We ask that you only report a participant if they joined the session and there were obvious issues with their participation. If a participant doesn't show up and you haven't heard from us (we'll get in touch with you if a panelist lets us know they're having issues joining your session), please mark the participant as a No-show instead of reporting them. This way, we will immediately source a new panelist for you.
Note: If we have registered a click from the participant attempting to join the session within a certain timeframe, then you'll see the following pop-up that states you'll need to report the participant instead: