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Have You Talked to Your Customers Lately?

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(1)

Have You Talked

to

Your

Customers

Lately?

A 7-Step Guide to Enterprise

Customer Interviews.

(2)

Table of Contents

00.

INTRODUCTION

01.

BUILD YOUR TEAM

02.

CREATE A RESEARCH PLAN

03.

NARROW YOUR FOCUS

04.

RECRUIT PARTICIPANTS

05.

CONDUCT INTERVIEWS

06.

SYNTHESIZE RESULTS

07.

SHARE INSIGHTS

(3)

00.

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

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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.

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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:

°

°

°

°

°

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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.

?

?

?

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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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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.

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We’d Love to

Help You

If you share our passion for design, we’d love to include you in the

growing list of companies we work with and consider friends.

Learn all the juicy details about

Objective-Based Design.

References

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