Managing Research Participants: The Complete Guide to Koji's Recruit Tab

When you run user research at scale, managing participants becomes as important as designing the interview itself. You need to know who responded, who dropped off, which responses meet your quality bar, and how to follow up with specific individuals. Koji's participant management system — accessible via the Recruit tab in every study — gives you a complete operational view of your respondent pool.

This guide covers every feature in the participant management workflow: from importing a list of contacts, to tracking interview status, filtering by completion, exporting for analysis, and archiving low-quality responses.

The Recruit Tab: Your Research Operations Center

Every Koji study has a Recruit tab that serves as the operational hub for your participant list. Here you see every person who has started or completed your interview, along with their status, intake form data, interview quality, and individual analysis.

The key columns in the participant table:

• Name / Email — captured via the intake form or imported from CSV
• Status — Active (interview in progress), Completed, Partial (started but did not finish), Archived
• Quality Score — the 1–5 AI-generated quality rating for their interview
• Duration — time spent in the interview from first to last message
• Source — how they accessed the interview (organic link, CSV import, custom link, API)
• Date — when they first started and when they completed
• Intake Responses — a column for each intake form field (email, role, company, and any custom fields you configured)

Click any row to open the Analysis Drawer — a side panel showing that participant's full interview transcript, AI insights, quality breakdown, themes, and structured question answers without leaving the participant list.

Participant Statuses Explained

Completed: The participant finished the interview naturally (the AI concluded the conversation) or clicked Done. Koji's quality gate has evaluated their response.

Partial: The participant started the interview but did not complete it. Their transcript may be incomplete. Partial responses are excluded from Insights Dashboard aggregations and report generation by default.

Active: The participant is currently in an interview session, or they have an open session that has not yet timed out.

Archived: You have manually hidden this participant from your analysis. Archived participants are excluded from reports and the default Recruit tab view. This is useful for removing test responses, bot responses, or participants who do not match your target profile. Archiving is reversible — participants can be restored at any time.

Filtering and Searching Participants

Use the filter controls at the top of the Recruit tab to narrow your view:

Status filter:

• All
• Completed
• Partial
• Active
• Archived

Search: Type any name, email address, or external ID to find a specific participant. This is useful when following up with a specific customer or verifying that a particular person's interview came through correctly.

Sort by quality score: Sort columns to surface your highest-quality interviews first — or to identify low-quality responses that may warrant archiving before you generate a report.

Importing Participants via CSV

If you have a list of participants you want to invite — from your CRM, customer database, or a recruitment panel — import them via CSV to pre-register them in Koji and generate personalized interview links for each person.

What the CSV Import Does

When you import a CSV:

1. Each row becomes a registered respondent record in Koji
2. Each respondent receives a unique personalized interview URL with a ?rid= parameter that tracks their identity
3. Koji returns a downloadable CSV with the personalized links appended to each row
4. You use those personalized links in your email outreach so responses are automatically attributed to the right person

CSV Format

Your CSV needs at minimum:

display_name, email
John Smith, [email protected]
Sarah Jones, [email protected]

Optional columns you can include:

• external_id — your internal ID for this person (CRM contact ID, user ID, etc.)
• metadata_company — company name for B2B segmentation
• metadata_plan — subscription plan for cohort analysis
• metadata_cohort — study cohort label (e.g., "q1-2025-enterprise")
• Any additional metadata_* columns with segment data you want to analyze later

Importing via the UI

Go to Recruit → Import Participants → Upload CSV. Koji validates your file, shows a preview of the first few rows, and generates personalized links in about 30 seconds for lists up to 10,000 rows.

Importing via API

For automated pipelines — triggering an interview invite for every customer who reaches a milestone in your product, for example — use the Koji API:

POST /api/v1/respondents/import
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

{
  "respondents": [
    {
      "display_name": "John Smith",
      "email": "[email protected]",
      "external_id": "crm_12345",
      "metadata": {
        "company": "Acme Corp",
        "plan": "enterprise",
        "cohort": "q4-2025"
      }
    }
  ]
}

The API response includes a personalized interview_url for each respondent. See Starting Interviews via API for complete documentation.

Personalized Interview Links

Personalized links are the mechanism that ties each response back to a specific known person. The link format is:

https://koji.so/i/your-study-slug?rid=RESPONDENT_ID

When a participant opens their personalized link:

• Their name (if provided) appears in the welcome message
• Their metadata is automatically attached to their interview record in the Recruit tab
• Their intake form can be pre-filled with known information
• Their response is attributed to their specific record

This is critical for several workflows:

• Follow-up research — knowing which customer said what, so you can follow up intelligently
• CRM integration — matching Koji responses back to your customer records via external_id
• Incentive distribution — confirming exactly which participants completed the interview
• Longitudinal studies — tracking the same participant across multiple research waves over time

Exporting Participant Data

To export your participant list:

1. Go to the Recruit tab
2. Apply any filters you need (e.g., Completed only, quality score above 3)
3. Click Export CSV

The exported file includes:

• All participant metadata (name, email, external_id)
• Interview status and quality score
• Interview duration and message count
• All intake form responses (one column per field)
• Date of first message and date of completion
• Unique interview ID (for linking back to transcripts)
• All custom metadata fields imported at the start

Common uses for participant exports:

• Distributing gift cards or incentives to completers
• Passing participant data back to your CRM
• Joining with quantitative survey data for mixed-methods analysis
• Compliance and research ethics documentation
• Identifying participants with high-quality responses for follow-up depth interviews

Archiving and Managing Response Quality

Not every response that comes in will meet your quality bar. Common reasons to archive a participant:

• Test responses — your own test runs, or test responses from teammates before launch
• Off-target participants — someone who does not match your screening criteria (they found the open link)
• Low-effort responses — extremely short, nonsensical, or obviously automated answers
• Duplicate responses — the same person who somehow submitted twice

To archive a participant: click the ... menu on their row and select Archive. To restore an archived participant, switch the filter to Archived and click Restore.

Archiving is fully non-destructive. The interview transcript and data are preserved — archiving only hides the response from your analysis views and report generation.

Koji's Automatic Quality Gate

Koji automatically evaluates every completed interview before it counts toward your credit usage. The quality gate checks:

• Minimum engagement — the participant must have exchanged enough messages to constitute a real conversation
• Response relevance — the AI checks whether answers address the research topic
• Completion depth — whether the AI was able to cover the key research questions in the brief

Interviews that fail the quality gate are marked as Not Counted and do not consume a credit. You will still see them in the Recruit tab with a quality indicator, and you can review them to understand why they did not pass. See How the Quality Gate Works for full specification.

This is a meaningful advantage over traditional survey tools, where every low-effort submission counts against your budget and contaminates your data.

Participant Feedback

Every completed interview includes a simple thumbs up / thumbs down feedback prompt shown to participants at the end of their interview. This captures participant experience data — not response quality.

Participant feedback is visible in the Recruit tab via the Feedback column. A pattern of thumbs-down responses combined with low quality scores may indicate a problem with your interview design: the interview is too long, the questions are confusing, or participants are encountering technical issues.

Tracking Respondents Across Multiple Studies

For longitudinal research or multi-wave studies, you can track the same participant across multiple Koji studies using the external_id field:

1. Import participants with the same external_id in each study wave
2. After each wave, export participant data
3. Join on external_id in your analysis tool (Excel, Google Sheets, your BI platform) to track how responses change over time

This enables powerful longitudinal analysis:

• How does customer sentiment evolve from onboarding month one to month six?
• How does product perception change between beta and general availability?
• How do employee experience scores shift across quarterly pulse research waves?

Best Practices

Always use personalized links for targeted outreach. Open recruitment links are fine for broad discovery research, but for any study where you need to know who said what, import participants first and use personalized links.

Archive test responses before analysis. Run test interviews before launch — and remember to archive them in the Recruit tab afterward so they do not contaminate your Insights Dashboard or reports.

Use external_id for CRM integration. Passing your CRM's contact ID as external_id makes it trivial to match Koji responses back to your customer database and enriches responses with all the CRM data you already have.

Export after each research wave. Do not rely on the Koji UI for long-term data storage. Export participant data and transcripts regularly as part of your research data management practice.

Use metadata fields for segmentation. Attaching cohort, plan, region, or segment metadata at import time makes post-analysis slicing much easier. You can filter the Recruit tab by these fields to compare how responses differ across sub-groups — enterprise vs. SMB, churned vs. retained, new vs. tenured customers.

Further reading on the blog

• How to Recruit User Research Participants: The Complete Guide (2026) — Recruiting the wrong participants is more expensive than recruiting none at all. Here's the complete playbook: screeners, channels, incentiv
• Best AI Market Research Tools in 2026: The Complete Buyer's Guide — AI has fundamentally changed market research. This guide compares the leading AI market research platforms—from AI-native interview tools li
• B2B Customer Research: The Complete Guide for Product Teams (2026) — B2B customer research is harder than B2C — you are navigating buying groups of 10+ stakeholders, gatekeepers, and enterprise procurement cyc

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