Lead Research Advisor - Mid-Market

Lead Research Advisor, Mid-Market (Austin or Chicago)

Job Description

We are looking for a Lead Research Advisor to join our growing Customer Success department. You will drive and grow important relationships by helping our customers find new ways to use our platform, ensuring they achieve maximum value from their investment. This role is a critical function that merges research expertise with a customer success motion, focusing on driving platform adoption and mitigating churn risk. You will also collaborate closely with a team of Research Advisors to design, recruit, and field research projects for our customers

You will have a chance to make a real difference for Dscout’s customers and build your career at the intersection of customer success and research. You are an incredible communicator and a genuine, creative problem-solver. You are our customer’s dedicated partner in success, helping them learn a new digital tool, execute powerful research, and maximize the return on their Dscout subscription. You collaborate closely with Account Directors to help to identify Dscout methodologies that best meet customer needs, build new use cases, identify growth opportunities, and ensure strong platform adoption across their organization. Internally, you are our customers’ champion, driving larger improvements to the platform and overall user experience.

The Lead Research Advisor position is among the most central to Dscout’s operations, so you’ll work with people from across the company on a regular basis, especially our product, engineering, and sales teams. If this sounds like you, apply today!

What you will do:

• Own a portfolio of mid-market accounts, driving adoption, retention, and expansion across the customer lifecycle.
• Act as a Dscout expert to train and educate customers on functionality and Dscout methodology, driving wide and deep platform adoption.
• Proactively identify account risk (e.g., low adoption, contact turnover) and own the risk mitigation plan, partnering with the account team and escalating to leadership as needed to protect renewal outcomes.
• Consult with customers to provide specific recommendations for their research designs on our software platform, ensuring successful outcomes and value realization.
• Equip customers to derive insights from data using Dscout’s analysis tools.
• Collaborate with Research Advisors to deliver and execute customer research studies.
• Partner with our Sales & Renewal team to identify expansion opportunities and proactively mitigate risk of churn. This role carries a retention target but does not own commercial transactions.
• Travel (up to 10%)  for onsite customer visits where you will build relationships, train and share best practices, and gather feedback to bring directly back to our Product team.
• Act as a customer advocate by sharing feedback internally to continuously improve Dscout’s product offerings.
• Success in this role is measured by KPI targets for renewal rate, customer check-ins, Executive Business Reviews (EBRs), and Renewal Manager (RM) handoffs.

What you need to have:

• 2+ years experience in research or product design, ideally with exposure to a Customer Success, agency, or consulting model.
• Proven ability to consult with clients/customers to drive product adoption and maximize customer lifetime value.
• BA/BS degree in anthropology, sociology, market research, design research, HCI related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience leading complex, high-impact research engagements for in-house or for clients across all phases of qualitative research, especially scoping/planning, design, recruiting, fielding, and analysis a plus.
• Excellent communication skills, both oral and written. Naturally able to strike a balance between friendly and professional in all communications.
• Able to work both collaboratively and independently, proven experience collaborating with and mentoring team members.
• Strong critical thinking skills; excited by the prospect of creative problem solving in the research and SaaS space alongside colleagues and customers.
• Experience with CRM tools (e.g., Salesforce) for activity, and account tracking.
• Flexible and eager to learn new things each and every day.
• Empathetic to others’ needs and circumstances.
• Highly organized, efficient, and detail-oriented.
• An innate curiosity about how and why people behave the way they do, and a desire to better understand complex behavioral problems and find solutions to those problems.