Have You Talked
to
Your
Customers
Lately?
A 7-Step Guide to Enterprise
Customer Interviews.
Table of Contents
00.
INTRODUCTION
01.
BUILD YOUR TEAM
02.
CREATE A RESEARCH PLAN
03.
NARROW YOUR FOCUS
04.
RECRUIT PARTICIPANTS05.
CONDUCT INTERVIEWS06.
SYNTHESIZE RESULTS07.
SHARE INSIGHTS00.
Introduction
Talking to your customers is the best
possible way to validate your assumptions.
The primary difference between a customer and a user is that a customer gives you money. If you’re interested in gaining powerful insights about purchase triggers then read on! Customer interviews are a powerful tool for discovering what buyers need to make a purchase decision. These can pair well with user interviews that may inform your product roadmap. Consider sharing this eBook with others to ensure a
01.
Build The
Right Team
Cross-functional representation is
essential to your success.
Bring in team members from Product Marketing, Product Management, Design, and Development. Including the right people early on will keep your project on track and increase buy-in to the recommendations that come from the interviews. Since your hopeful team members are likely to be very busy and have other responsibilities, be sure to communicate the time commitment when recruiting for this project.
Write a
Research
Plan
Agreement on goals will ensure a
smooth process and improve results.
A research plan will help your team communicate the purpose of the interviews to outside stakeholders and keep you on track during the process.
If you’ve previously created
proto-personas then you probably already have many assumptions documented.
02.
But you know what ass uming does, right?
VALIDATING ASSUMPTIONS SHOULD ALWAYS BE A PRIMARY GOAL OF CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS.
Hypothesis:
Assumptions:
°
°
°
°
°
03.
Narrow
Your
Focus
Refine your research plan so you
aren’t asking impossible questions
or undertaking a project with no
real value.
How do you intend on applying your research? Is the output a new release of features, an updated persona list, or a revised editorial calendar?
Be honest. Your goals and questions must facilitate your intended output.
?
?
?
KEEP YOUR RESEARCH FOCUSED BY MAPPING INTERVIEW QUESTIONS TO GOALS.
?
?
?
04.
Recruit
Participants
Proper screening will reduce wasted time and increase interview quality.
You are spending considerable human capital to conduct these interviews, and you may even be paying participants.
Whether or not you have an existing database of customers, you should still screen participants to find people who best match the use-case you’re trying to validate.
04.
Recruit
Participants
Write a screener
Every question in your screener must have a single purpose: to screen out participants you don’t
want. Put the questions that are most likely to screen people out
at the start of the survey and work your way down.
Distribute your screener You may need to distribute
your screener to dozens (even hundreds) of people to
find a sample size of willing and qualified participants. Aim for 5 or 6 people per
round of interviews.
Confirm and schedule interviews These discussions may require a Non-Disclosure Agreement or other
forms of legal protection for your company or the participants. Take
care of legalities first. Then schedule interviews in-person,
online, or however.
1
2
3
WRITE YOUR OWN SCREENER USING
THIS TEMPLATE FROM GOOGLE VENTURES’ MICHAEL MARGOLIS.
KEEP THIS MANTRA: “IF I INTERVIEWED ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD I LEARN SOMETHING DIFFERENT?”
A REMINDER PHONE CALL THE DAY BEFORE WILL HELP
DON’Ts DOs
• Start off easy by asking questions about their background to build a rapport. • Get specific on events and scenarios. • Ask open-ended questions about
goals and experiences.
• Mix methods: listen and watch. • Allow for tangential discussion.
Talk to Your
Customers
Customer interviews should be a
dialogue not an interrogation.
Have a conversation, don’t follow a script.
Facilitate a conversation by creating a discussion guide that includes the types of questions you’ll ask along with the topics you hope to cover.
• Ask leading questions. • Ask about the future.
• Correct what participants say. You want to learn their story, not how well they conform to yours. • Disclose your hypothesis or what
you need to learn to do your job. • Let people design the product... that’s
your job. If you get a feature suggestion, simply ask “How would that help you?” to understand the underlying need.
06.
Synthesize
the Results
This is the time for reflection,
summarization, and comparison.
The goal is to identify common traits and behaviors among the customers you interviewed, and plot your customers along a spectrum line. For example: technical/non-technical, novice/expert,
non-funded/funded, lazy/ambitious. This exercise will uncover patterns. Some
individuals will be clustered together across multiple spectrums… congratulations you have a persona!
Share Your
Insights
Give Customer X a face and name.
Visualize the results of your customer research in a deck or a poster. A well-designed document can help to rally your entire organization behind a customer’s needs and wants.
Approaching business challenges with the customer’s perspective in mind will help you make decisions that are better for business.