Customer Interviews

An exploratory conversation with a customer that is focused on exploring their jobs, pains, gains, and willingness to pay.

When to use them?

Customer Interviews are ideal for gaining qualitative insights into the fit between your value proposition and the customer segment. It’s also a good starting point for price testing.

Customer Interviews are not ideal as a substitute for what people will do. It's not uncommon for Customers say one thing and doing something else....

• Evidence strength: Very low - Low

• Setup effort: Low

• Time to complete: Low

• Product Risk(s): Desirability, Viability

• Capabilities: Research
  Almost anyone can learn to do these well with practice. A research partner is a luxury otherwise your design partner can take the lead.

• Requirements: Target Customer
  Works best when you focus on a target customer. Without a customer in mind, you'll get mixed results and conflicting feedback.

• Prepare:

  • Write a script to explore

    • Jobs, pains and gains

    • Willingness to pay

    • Unmet needs

  • Find and book interviewees

  • Assign roles: Facilitator, scribe, observer. If you're on your own, consider recording the interview (with permission) and rewatch to take notes.

• Execute:

  • For each interview:

    • Facilitator ask questions from the script and dive deeper as required

    • Scribe tasks notes. Captures quotes and event notes on body language

  • 15 min debrief while thoughts are fresh. Scribe captures in the notes

• Analyse:

  • Affinity sort the notes to cluster and bundle ideas

  • Perform a ranking analysis

• Housekeeping (5 mins):

  • Welcome the customer and thank them for coming (sounds obvious, but it's easy to forget!)

  • Ask if it's ok to record the interview - this way you've got everything verbatim in case the scribe falls behind a bit. Assure them the recording, and the interview in general, is only for internal use. You'll share this with your team, but will keep it confidential otherwise – e.g., you won't be pulling quotes for advertising purposes

• Warm-up questions (10 mins):

  • Lead with the soft-ball questions from the interview script you prepared. Part of the foundation you're laying here is establishing rapport. Pay attention to cues like body language and tone. Does your customer feel at ease? Are they giving you the full story?

• Meaty questions (5 mins):

  • We dive into the questions from your interview script to get the specifics you're after. You don't have to follow the interview script exactly. Feel free to ask follow-up questions if you uncover a pearl of wisdom

  • The questions serve as an outline to achieve consistency across all interviews

  • It's ok to go with the flow as long as you're getting valuable info your team can use! Ensure you're validating your notes as the interview goes along. Repeating back what you've heard and ask questions in different ways to verify that you've captured the customer's views accurately

• Observer questions (10 mins);

  • If you have observers in the room, and they have additional questions, now is the time

  • The questions should prompt deeper thought and reflection

• Turn the tables (10 mins):

  • You can get more out of customer interviews when we turn them in to a two-way conversation. Give your customer a chance to ask questions of you

• Wrap up (5 mins):

  • Thank the customer for their time

  • Hand over the swag or confirm contact details for remote interviews

Pro-tip:

• Ask open ended questions . For example:

  • "Is this an important feature?" is a bad question because the answer is Yes/No and doesn't reveal anything

  • "Why is this feature useful?" is a good question because it's more likely to inspire answers with more descriptive details that might uncover deeper insights

  • "What would happen if this feature disappeared?" is even better – it'll either sharply illustrate the feature's value, or make the customer realise that their life wouldn't change much and maybe the feature isn't so critical after all

• Follows from:

  • Discussion Forums

  • Sales Force Feedback

  • Search Analysis

• Feeds into:

  • Basic Prototype

  • Customer Survey