Course 1.4: Customer Interviews | Creating a Uniform Structure for Your Customer Interviews

Myk Pono -

1.4.  Creating a Uniform Structure for Your Customer Interviews

Now you know WHO you’re talking to and WHAT you’ll be talking about, let’s move on to the structure. How will you structure your customer interviews?

First, figure out how many people you’ll be interviewing and for how long. You’ll want to talk to at least 10-20 people in total.

As a rule, I like to plan for my interviews to take about 30 minutes. So use that as a benchmark for your interviews. Customer interviews might be longer, while prospect interviews might be much shorter.

Now that you’ve got that figured out, get out your calendar and block specific times to do these interviews.

Let’s take a look at how I manage my calendar.

I set aside a block of 2-3 hours each morning just to do my interviews. It’s paramount that you use a full chunk of time to do your interviews, instead of sprinkling them in throughout the day. This way you’re fully focused on your task.

Switching from task to task will eat up unnecessary time.

When you go to set up your interview, you want to make the scheduling process as smooth and simple as possible. Imagine a simple request turning into 10 emails back and forth just to figure out a time! How annoying is that?

This is why I use a scheduling tool to make it a painless process. Some tools I use are Calendly, Mixmax, Zoom, and Hangouts.

I also recommend setting up a sequence of reminder messages for those who have booked interviews with you.

Nobody likes a no-show! If you use a tool like Calendly, you can set it up automatically to remind them 1 day before, 1 hour before, etc and it’s really helpful.

Now that you’ve got your interview structure planned out and your subjects scheduled, there’s one more thing to keep in mind -- your team members.

If you have team members that you want on the call with you, make sure your schedules are lined up.

I highly recommend you make sure they can show up to the actual interview.

Why? Because what I’ve found is that if you send them the recording instead, they won’t ever listen to it!

That’s a shame because their perspective could be very important!

However, I want you to keep in mind that you’re the only one doing the questioning.

The rest of your team should stay quiet during the interview. I usually introduce myself and mention “So and so from my team is also on the call, they’ll be taking notes if that’s ok with you”.

If a team member has a question they want to ask, have them write it down or send questions in Slack for you to ask.

Great, now you have your interview planned! Now it’s time to get those interviews set up. I’ll see you in the next lesson.

Checklists:

Formulating Your Research Question

  • Start with your company's business objectives, and break them down into research objectives
  • Identify how subjects are currently handling the problem you want to solve
  • Determine how high of a priority solving this problem is for them
  • Try to understand their roles and responsibilities for additional context
  • Learn what customers want or need to achieve with a solution like yours
  • Understand subjects' role in the decision-making and buying processes
  • Identify current alternatives they're either using or thinking of using

Choosing the Right Interview Subjects

Should you interview...

  • Decision-makers, end-users, or both?
  • Customers, prospects, or both?
  • Subjects at specific types or sizes of companies?
  • Subjects with specific titles?
  • Mainstream users, extreme users, or both?

Asking Good Interview Questions

  • Ask directly for specific examples
  • Ask open-ended questions, not "yes or no" questions
  • Invite other members of your team to contribute questions or attend interviews
  • Use a uniform structure to keep interviews consistent