Q3, often known as the pre-planning season, is when forward-thinking teams gather the insights they need to shape upcoming strategies. Unlike Q4, when planning and execution take center stage, Q3 provides breathing room – a chance to understand customer behaviors, assess market trends, and align around experience-driven goals.

The Window Before the Window

If Q4 is when decisions are made, Q3 is when the evidence is gathered. It’s the ideal time to conduct meaningful customer research and extract the insights needed to inform everything from product roadmaps to service experience improvements. Waiting until later can mean rushing insights work or skipping it entirely – which leads to reactive or misguided decisions.

Key Reasons Q3 is a Strategic Inflection Point:

• Time to influence, not just support: Insights gathered now can shape planning, not just validate it.
• Customer sentiment clarity: Mid-year reviews offer a clear look at how customer needs have evolved.
• Campaign lessons learned: Q1 and Q2 results provide fresh data to analyze patterns, gaps, or wins.
• Team capacity available: Without the pressure of holiday launches or year-end reporting, many teams use Q3 to reset and look ahead.

The Role of CX Talent in This Phase

Bringing in an insights manager or customer experience expert during Q3 allows your team to prioritize discovery, rather than react to outcomes. A skilled CX professional can help:

• Design and run quick-turn customer research
• Analyze customer journey data for optimization opportunities
• Spot behavior shifts or sentiment changes earlier
• Package insights in ways senior leadership can act on fast

If your team is stretched thin or lacks senior research support, platforms like SIVO’s On Demand Talent allow you to bring in experienced consumer insights professionals who can ramp up support quickly – often within days or weeks, not months. This makes it easier to get the insights you need before Q4 pressure builds, without committing to long-term CX hiring.

In short, Q3 offers a unique opportunity to pause, listen, and plan. With the right customer insights professional in place, your team can surface the data that matters and use it to drive better, customer-informed planning all year long.

Not every insights role is created equal – especially when it comes to strategic planning. A great CX Insights Manager combines research know-how, strategic thinking, and a clear understanding of how customer experiences connect to business results. But what exactly should you look for?

Key Traits of a High-Impact CX Manager

Here are some of the most important skills and characteristics to seek when hiring or bringing in temporary customer experience talent:

• Customer-centric mindset: They don’t just look at survey results – they think deeply about how customers feel, act, and navigate their journey across touchpoints.
• Data storytelling ability: A strong CX leader knows how to turn analytics into a narrative leadership can understand and act on.
• Strategic orientation: Look for professionals who go beyond reporting what the data says – they help you understand what to do about it in a business context.
• Cross-functional savvy: They must be able to collaborate with marketing, product, operations, and brand teams to drive cross-team buy-in and execution.
• Experience with speed and scale: Whether through a past insight role, agency work, or On Demand engagements, they should be comfortable running lean and fast.

The Value of Industry Experience

While CX principles apply across industries, hiring someone with familiarity in your customer type, product model, or service flow can accelerate results. For example, a CX insights lead with experience in retail may quickly spot missed upsell moments or checkout friction points, while someone from healthcare might focus on emotional touchpoints or long-term trust signals.

CX Manager vs Freelancer vs On Demand Talent

If you've been searching for how to hire a customer experience expert, it's helpful to understand your options. You might consider:

• Freelancers: Often cost-efficient, but may lack senior-level strategy or specific industry understanding. Many are freelancers by necessity, not specialization.
• Agencies or consultancies: Can add value but may involve high fees, rigid scopes, or long timelines. May not offer embedded ownership or flexibility.
• On Demand Talent (like SIVO’s network): Offers the best of both worlds – highly experienced, fractional CX leaders who embed quickly within your team and bring immediate strategic value. No lengthy hiring cycles. No long-term commitment.

Here’s a fictional example for context: A mid-sized DTC brand preparing for Q4 noticed a dip in conversion rates and wanted to understand why. Instead of hiring a full-time CX manager, they turned to On Demand Talent to bring in a veteran insights professional with retail experience. Within three weeks, they had new customer journey maps, pain point analyses, and quick-turn insights that directly informed the Q4 roadmap. No onboarding lag, no long contracts – just fast, focused results.

Ultimately, a strong CX Insights Manager isn’t just someone who can run reports – they’re someone who can uncover what your customers are really telling you and help you act on it in a way that drives growth. Whether your need is short-term or strategic, choosing seasoned, insight-driven talent sets the tone for better, more customer-aligned decisions later in the year.

As Q3 approaches, many organizations are ramping up efforts to identify customer experience (CX) insights that will guide strategic Q4 planning and beyond. A key part of this process is identifying the right type of talent to lead or support insight work. For businesses evaluating how to fill urgent CX roles, there are typically three categories to choose from: freelancers, agencies, and On Demand Talent. Each comes with strengths – and trade-offs.

Freelancers: Flexible but Often Limited in Scope

Freelancers offer an accessible entry point when you need ad hoc help. You can find them on numerous marketplaces and often hire them quickly for specific deliverables or short-term tasks. However, CX freelancers may lack industry-specific knowledge, strategic perspective, or experience with complex stakeholder alignment.

If your Q3 planning requires quick but basic execution – like short-term survey analysis or customer sentiment data pulls – a freelancer may suffice. However, if you're tackling long-term CX strategy or cross-functional decision-making, their limitations can become apparent.

Agencies: Full-Service but Less Nimble

A traditional market research or CX agency offers an established, full-service approach. They often come with well-defined methodologies and support structures, especially for qualitative and quantitative research. However, agency partnerships typically involve longer timelines, higher costs, and less flexibility. In fast-moving environments, this may not be ideal for Q3 planning, when agility is key and decisions can't wait.

For businesses looking for deep, consultative insight work with higher budgets and extended lead times, agencies can play a helpful role. But during pre-planning season, the need is often for someone who can plug in fast and work alongside your internal team – without waiting weeks or months to kick off.

On Demand Talent: The Strategic Middle Ground

This is where On Demand Talent stands out. Unlike freelancers, SIVO’s On Demand Talent professionals come with deep CX experience, ready to embed into your team and drive value from day one. And unlike traditional agencies, they work directly alongside your organization for a set period – offering both flexibility and strategic presence.

• Quick onboarding – professionals are matched and ready to begin in days or weeks
• No long-term commitment – ideal for a high-impact sprint during Q3 planning
• Customized to your needs – find the right functional expertise or industry fit

Whether you need short-term customer insights support, a fractional CX talent partner, or someone to fill in for a team lead during a transition, On Demand Talent offers smart, scalable CX hiring – without the trade-offs of other models.

Finding the right CX Insights Manager quickly – especially in a crucial period like Q3 – can feel like a race against time. Many traditional hiring processes take months, and internal bandwidth may be limited. So, where should you look to find experienced consumer insights professionals without delay?

Tap Into Specialized Talent Networks

Instead of generic job boards or gig platforms, consider solutions designed specifically around insights and market research professionals. Platforms like SIVO’s On Demand Talent network are built to connect companies directly with vetted experts – not generalists or entry-level freelancers.

These professionals aren’t just available – they’re ready. With a strong background in CX strategy, consumer insights, brand tracking, and behavioral research, they’re able to integrate quickly and begin leading or supporting initiatives without a steep learning curve.

Beware the Limitations of Traditional Hiring

If you're considering recruiting a full-time CX manager just for Q3, it's worth weighing the time and cost. From writing the job description and posting to interviewing, offer negotiation, and onboarding, the typical hiring process can extend 60–90 days or more.

By then, you may already be well into Q4 – and the opportunity to impact planning could be lost.

Why Speed Matters in Q3 Planning

Q3 is not the time for long lead times. It’s when many strategic decisions – product roadmaps, investments, customer journeys – are being shaped. You need a CX professional who can translate data into planning-ready insights in weeks, not quarters.

On Demand Talent offers a targeted solution: identify your exact needs, and get matched with someone who fits – fast. Whether it's support for a voice-of-customer project, segment analysis, UX insight, or overall CX strategy planning, this approach gets you the help you need before Q4 plans are locked in.

Quick Tip: Build a brief internal list of your CX knowledge gaps heading into Q3. Then align those gaps with the expertise available via On Demand Talent – accelerating your time to impact.

Strategic planning doesn’t start in Q4 – it’s shaped by the insight work delivered in Q3. That’s why getting the right CX talent in place now can determine how well-informed and actionable your planning process will be later in the year.

SIVO’s On Demand Talent solution is designed to help companies bridge short-term gaps and strengthen insight capabilities without the delay or high cost of traditional hiring or consulting engagements.

Flexible Expertise, Ready to Plug In

When your team is stretched or in transition, SIVO matches you with experienced insights professionals who align with your goals and workflow. These aren’t interns or general freelancers – they’re seasoned researchers, CX managers, strategists, and analysts with careers built inside leading organizations.

Examples of How On Demand Talent Can Support Q3 Planning

• An insights lead to consolidate existing data and prepare a CX readout for executives
• A researcher to run a quick-turn survey to gauge customer preferences for a product launch
• A strategist to build a cross-functional customer journey map aligned to key outcomes

Each of these scenarios requires know-how, speed, and the ability to work within complex team environments – all strengths of On Demand Talent from SIVO.

Support Without the Long-Term Commitment

Quarterly planning often calls for specialized, time-boxed support. SIVO helps you address these moments with flexible engagement models, so you can bring in the right expert when needed without adding permanent headcount or taking on a lengthy agency contract.

And because you’re working with professionals specifically curated for this kind of insight work, you get less ramp-up and more results.

A Smarter Way to Build Insight Capacity

SIVO’s On Demand Talent isn’t just a quick fix – it’s a strategic solution built to enhance your customer insights function during key periods. From Fortune 500s to fast-moving startups, our clients use this model to build agility, improve focus, and boost the effectiveness of their strategic planning.

Put simply: if the question is how to hire a customer experience expert in time for Q3, On Demand Talent is the answer.