Course 4.2: Customer Interviews | Improving Future Interviews
4.2. Improving Future Interviews
Whether you ended up with actionable feedback or not, now is the time to start thinking about how to improve your customer interview process.
Even though I’ve conducted countless rounds of interviews, I learn something new each time that makes my process just that much better.
And of course if you don’t feel like you’ve learned anything from your interviews, you definitely want to take a look at how you can improve your subject research and your question development.
At the end of the round of interviews, I recommend jotting down things you did well, things you did poorly, or things you wish you’d done differently.
For example, did you catch yourself filling silences or inadvertently supplying subjects with the answers you wanted to hear?
If so, plan how you’ll avoid that in the future.
Were you not as prepared as you’d like to be? Book time for research on your calendar in the future so that you have more time to prepare.
If possible, try to capture these notes immediately after each call while the memories are still fresh in your brain. If you don’t, reading your call summaries days or even weeks later you may forget a lot of details that can improve your future interviews. Review your notes for things you’d like to improve before your next customer interview.
It feels great to be able to make incremental improvements as you go.
Summary:
- How can you improve your customer interviews?
- Immediately after each call, capture notes on:
- What you did well
- What you did poorly
- What you wish you’d done differently
- Capture notes when your memories are still fresh
- Review them before your next customer interview and make it a point to practice doing things differently
- Next steps/final thoughts
- What do you do with the information you captured