How To Conduct a Customer Interview [Quick Guide]

Customer interviews are in-depth discussions with existing or potential customers aimed at understanding their experiences, perceptions, needs, and desires. They provide extremely valuable qualitative insights that can help guide product development, marketing, and overall business strategy.

Conducting customer interviews is an important process that all companies should invest in on an ongoing basis. The key benefits include:

• Getting a deeper understanding of customer problems, frustrations and needs. This enables you to improve your product/service to better meet customer requirements.
• Identifying new opportunities and ideas for features or offerings customers would value. Interviews allow you to explore needs that surveys may not uncover.
• Building empathy and rapport with customers. Interviews allow more personalized engagement and help humanize customers.
• Receiving honest feedback and reactions. Customers tend to open up more during a real conversation compared to filling out a survey.
• Testing concepts or ideas to get customer input before investing significant resources in developing them.

The process for conducting effective customer interviews generally includes: defining objectives, identifying target customers, developing questions, conducting test interviews, scheduling interviews, interviewing customers, collecting feedback, analyzing findings and sharing recommendations.

Determine your objectives

Before conducting customer interviews, it's important to determine your objectives and goals. Understanding why you are doing these interviews will help guide the process and keep it focused.

Some potential objectives could include:

• Understanding customer pain points and needs
• Getting feedback on new product or feature ideas
• Learning how customers currently use your product
• Identifying opportunities to improve customer experience
• Gauging interest in potential new offerings
• Determining how your product fits into the customer's workflow

Set 1-2 clear, specific goals to accomplish through the interviews. This will help you craft relevant questions and have a purpose driving each conversation. For example, your goal could be "Understand the top 3 frustrations customers have with our onboarding process."

With defined objectives, you'll be able to stay on track during the interviews, extract insights tied to your goals, and walk away with directly actionable findings.

Identify your target customers

When conducting customer interviews, it's important to identify specific target customers or customer segments to focus on. Trying to talk to every customer will not provide useful insights.

First, determine 2-3 main customer personas or segments that are important to your business. For example, you may want to interview both new and long-time customers, or consumers and business customers.

Then, aim to interview 5-8 people within each key segment. This provides enough data to identify themes and trends within each group.

It's also important to consider diversity of perspectives. Try to speak with a mix of genders, age groups, geographies, etc within each segment. This helps avoid bias and ensures you gather a breadth of insights.

Finally, identify criteria for screening participants. This may include demographics, purchase history, usage behavior, or other attributes that indicate they belong to the target segments.

With strategic targeting and recruiting, you can conduct focused interviews that reveal valuable insights from your priority customer groups.

Prepare your interview guide

Developing an effective interview guide is crucial for collecting useful insights from customer interviews. Here are some tips:

• Develop a list of open-ended questions. Avoid yes/no questions. Ask questions that encourage interviewees to provide detailed responses about their experiences, perceptions, and needs.
• Organize questions by topic or narrative flow. Group related questions together. Arrange them in a logical order that promotes natural conversation.
• Start with introductory questions. Begin with questions about the customer's background and general experiences. This helps build rapport.
• Follow with key questions. Ask the most important questions next. These will provide the main insights you're seeking.
• End with concluding questions. Finish with any final questions and an opportunity for interviewees to share anything else.
• Limit the number of questions. Try to keep your guide under 15 questions. You want to respect people's time while still getting the information you need.
• Use probes and prompts. Prepare probes to request more detail if responses seem vague. Have prompts ready to steer the conversation back on track if needed.
• Test your interview guide. Pilot your questions with a colleague to refine them before conducting official customer interviews.

Conduct test interviews

Before conducting your full set of customer interviews, it's important to test your interview guide. Testing will allow you to refine the flow, wording, and relevance of your questions.

Start by conducting 1-2 test interviews with people similar to your target customers. These can even be colleagues or friends roleplaying as customers.

During the test interviews, pay attention to how the conversation flows. Do your questions make sense in the order you've asked them? Do the questions elicit detailed responses about the topics you want to cover?

Take notes on where the conversation seems to stall or where you have to re-explain a question. These are signs that the wording or order may need tweaking.

After completing your test interviews, refine the guide based on your observations. Consider reordering questions so they build logically. Rephrase any confusing questions. You may even need to add or remove questions if certain topics didn't provide useful insights.

Conduct another 1-2 test interviews with your refined guide. Iterate on the process until you feel confident you have a guide that will lead to productive conversations.

The goal is to end up with a conversational guide that flows well and elicits the insights you need from customers. Putting in this upfront effort will pay off significantly when conducting your full set of interviews.

Schedule interviews

Contact customers and explain the purpose of the interview. Let them know you want to learn more about their experience with your product/service so you can identify areas for improvement.

Book 30-60 minute interviews at a time that's convenient for the customer. Try to schedule the interviews at least a week in advance so customers have time to prepare.

Some best practices when scheduling customer interviews:

• Explain the interview process and format so they know what to expect. Let them know it will be a conversational format.
• Offer different options for interview format - phone, video chat, or in person. Provide flexibility to accommodate their schedule.
• Follow up any scheduled interviews with calendar invites and reminders to confirm the time.
• Ask if they need any accommodations to make the interview accessible and comfortable for them.
• Provide an agenda ahead of time so they understand the topics that will be covered.
• Offer small incentives like gift cards as a thank you for their time. This can help improve response rates.
• Be persistent and follow up if you don't hear back initially. Customers are busy so follow ups are often needed.

Proper scheduling and preparation is key to conducting successful customer interviews that provide valuable insights.

Conduct Interviews

When conducting the actual interviews, follow these tips:

• Ask questions from your prepared guide. Follow the flow you outlined, but don't be afraid to ask for clarification or elaboration if needed. Stick to the script to ensure you cover all the key points.
• Probe with follow-up questions. If an interviewee says something interesting, ask them to tell you more. Go off-script if needed to better understand their experiences, perspectives, or ideas.
• Listen attentively. Avoid interrupting or jumping in too quickly. Let people fully share their thoughts before moving to the next question. Take notes on key points. - You can use Glyph AI's business transcription platform to record, transcribe and extract actionable data from customer interviews, making it faster to gather informed insights and better document findings.
• Show empathy. Understand that critiquing something people care about can make them defensive. Make it clear you appreciate their time and feedback.
• Avoid leading questions that push people toward a certain answer. Ask open-ended questions to get authentic viewpoints.
• Wrap up by thanking them and asking if they have any final thoughts to share. Let them know how their feedback will be used. Reiterate confidentiality if applicable.

Following these tips will help you have productive customer interviews that provide meaningful insights. Actively listening and making people feel comfortable sharing will lead to honest, thoughtful responses.

Collect Feedback

After completing the interview, it's important to thank the customer for their time and participation. Send a follow-up email or call expressing your gratitude.

Also ask if they have any feedback on how you can improve the interview process for future customers. Getting input directly from interview participants allows you to refine your approach. Some questions to ask:

• Was the interview location convenient and comfortable?
• Did the questions make sense and seem relevant?
• Was the interviewer polite, professional, and a good listener?
• Did the interview length seem appropriate or should it be shorter/longer?
• Were there any questions you felt were missing?
• Do you have any other suggestions to improve the experience?

Soliciting this feedback shows customers you value their perspective and want to provide the best interview experience possible. It also generates insights you may not have considered when designing the process. Make sure to document the feedback and review it before conducting your next round of customer interviews. Small tweaks informed by customer input can go a long way towards producing better interview data over time.

Analyze your findings

After you've conducted all your interviews, it's time to analyze your findings and turn your notes into insights. Here are some tips for analyzing customer interview data:

Review interview notes for key themes

Go through all your interview notes and highlight the key themes that emerged across multiple customers. Look for common pain points, needs, goals, objections, and feedback. Make a list of the key themes and patterns you identified. Prioritize the ones mentioned most frequently.

Summarize insights and recommendations

For each major theme or finding, write a summary of the insight and your recommendations. For example:

• Insight: Customers find the registration process difficult and frustrating.
• Recommendation: Simplify and streamline the registration process by removing unnecessary fields, using clear language, and adding illustrations.

Try to synthesize your notes from multiple customers into concise, actionable insights and recommendations. Focus on the most important takeaways that can inform product decisions and improvements.

Present user quotes

Include compelling quotes from customers that illustrate key insights. This helps bring the findings to life and adds credibility. Ensure quotes represent the sentiment of multiple customers.

Create user personas

If appropriate, create 1-2 user personas representing your target customers based on the interview findings. Include details on their goals, pain points, behaviors and needs. Personas help humanize the data and guide decision making.

Thoroughly analyzing interview data is critical for identifying opportunities and turning customer feedback into action. Take time to synthesize notes, identify themes, develop insights and present recommendations that will drive impact.

Share recommendations

After conducting customer interviews and analyzing the findings, it's time to create a report to share back with stakeholders. This report should summarize the key takeaways and recommendations from the interviews.

Create report with main takeaways

The report should concisely present the most important insights from the interviews. Focus on findings that are relevant to your research objectives and that have broader implications. For example, if 5 customers mentioned poor support as a pain point, that is likely a key takeaway to highlight.

For each major finding or recommendation, provide supporting evidence from the interviews. This can include relevant quotes, metrics, or examples mentioned by customers. Make sure to note any themes or patterns that emerged across multiple interviews.

Aim for a report length of 2-5 pages maximum. You want it to be focused and scannable for busy stakeholders. Visuals like charts or graphs can help summarize key metrics too.

Present to stakeholders for next steps

Schedule a meeting to present the report and recommendations to key stakeholders. The presentation should briefly recap the research goals, methodology, and key findings.

Allow ample time for discussion of next steps based on the interview results. Be prepared with some preliminary ideas for follow-up initiatives, features, or other changes to address customer feedback.

Seek input from stakeholders on how to prioritize proposed next steps. Gain alignment on the top 1-2 actions to take immediately following the research.

Close the presentation by recapping decisions made and next steps for different teams. Provide the report for stakeholders to reference going forward. Follow up on action items from the meeting.

‍