Course 3.2: Customer Interviews | 15 Tips for Conducting Better Customer Interviews: Tips 6-8

3.2. 15 Tips for Conducting Better Customer Interviews: Tips 6-8

In this video, we will review Tips #6-8.

Tip #6: Create a comfortable environment.

You don’t want your subject to feel like this is an interrogation. You want them to want to talk to you. Your interviews should feel like a chat between friends or colleagues with similar interests. Getting to that point will be different for every call.

You and your subject might naturally click, or you might not. Expect customers to be naturally suspicious that you’re trying to take advantage of them. To calm their suspicions, it’s up to you to build rapport.

Tip #7: Your interview should not feel like an interview at all. It should be a conversation.

Here are a couple of tricks to help build that rapport. Start with some small-talk. If you pick up that your subject is wary from the start, get them talking on a light subject, like the weather or sports, to open them up.

It also helps if you read questions starting with broader topics and then narrowing them down.

For example, when I was conducting customer interviews to learn how teams manage content creation and distribution process, right after introduction questions, I'd start asking questions that follow content creation process: first how you create your strategy, how you decided on topics to write about, how you go about producing and reviewing content, and so on… and then I'd ask about content publishing, distribution, and tracking.

There is a clear pattern here that roughly follows content creation and distribution processes.

It’ll help your subject understand that there’s a sequence, rather than a target of rapid-fire questioning.  

Tip #8: You’re in control of the conversation. It’s up to you to direct it.

I had an interview with a customer who would say “I’m not comfortable sharing that information” or “I can’t talk about that for privacy reasons” every time I asked a question. I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to get any answers out of this person.

Instead of continuing, I thanked him and said “I want to be respectful of your time, but it seems like there’s not a lot of information you can share at this point.”

We cut it off early, and everyone was happy, because - even though it wasn’t a fit - I still handled it politely. It isn’t much fun to get on a call and not be able to get the information you hoped for. But don’t stress about it too much -- that’s why you have more interviews scheduled!

Another common issue you’ll run into is keeping your conversation on track.

Once, I spent the first 10 minutes of an interview listening to a prospect complain about the politics of his organization. It was my job to steer the conversation back on track. I would say “Yeah, I can see why that would be frustrating, but by the way, how did you go about trying to solve the problem?” If customers keep talking about irrelevant topics, you have to learn how to politely shift the conversation to where you need it to go.

My next tip, #9, is to embrace the silence.

This was a tough lesson for me to learn. But think about it -- your questions are going to require your subject to stop and reflect. And that means silence.

You’ll be tempted to fill the silence by giving them suggestions. If you do that, you’ll end up telling them what you want to hear, not what they think.

So embrace the silence, and let your customers think a little bit about how to answer your questions. There’s nothing wrong with silence on these calls.

Then, when you do start getting answers, don’t be afraid to drill into the specifics of their responses.

Imagine that a customer told you they’d had a successful article. Ok, so what made it successful?

What metrics did they track?

Was it successful because it drove a lot of traffic?

Was it because it landed 10 demos, or because 10 industry experts emailed them to say it was an excellent article?

Ask for specifics, because you need to understand the context. You don’t want to go back to your notes later and find that you still have questions about why customers gave you the answers they did.

Ok, that’ wraps up Tips #6-9.

Let’s move on to 10-15, where we dive more deeply into specific interview questions.