Course 4.3: Customer Interviews | Next Steps in the Customer Interview Process + Summary

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4.3.  Next Steps in the Customer Interview Process + Summary

The final part of your wrap-up process should be figuring out what to do with the information you captured.

For instance, you’ve already determined whether or not you have any valid takeaways from your initial set. Based on that, do you need to continue interviewing in order to achieve your initial research goal?

Do you need more subjects?

Are there other people who should be brought into the process?

Generally speaking, I like to have a regular cadence of interviews regardless of my or my team's focus. That’s because I’m always going to benefit from having access to more information. I try to have at least one prospect or customer interview on my calendar every other week. I recommend you do the same. Depending on the findings from your interviews, it may be appropriate at this point to share your findings with other team members.

This might include members of your GTM team who participated in your interviews: your company’s marketers, salespeople, product managers, designers, and engineers. It can also be helpful to try to create a product council.

This would include customers who get exclusive insight into your product roadmap in exchange for providing input on product features before they’re built or released. [.... validating problems…]

Not all of your customers will be candidates for this type of arrangement, but if you run into interview subjects that are particularly helpful, it might be worth asking whether they’d be interested in being involved at this level.

Whether you’re working internally with your GTM team or externally with a product council, circulate your findings to get feedback on your data. If everyone agrees that the findings are valid, share them with the team members or teams that should take action based on them.

As an example, if your customer interviews have surfaced important product findings, communicate them to your product and development teams so that they can be integrated into any existing prioritization systems.

If you’ve captured findings on product messaging, make sure all of your company’s sales and marketing people are looped into what is and isn’t working for your customers. Interview findings don’t necessarily mean your product team needs to drop everything to create the new functionality you’ve identified.

Or that the marketing team needs to scrap all of its materials to create collateral with new language based on interview data.

Instead, these and other teams need to take this information into consideration alongside other sources of research or input they’re using to form a more holistic understanding of what changes are required.

If possible, try to have each of these teams commit to specific actions in terms of what they’ll do with interview findings.

This could be something like adding a proposed feature to the priority list or testing a piece of marketing collateral with new messaging.

Or it could just mean agreeing to discuss your findings in the next team meeting. In any case, try to get teams to commit to taking action.

Otherwise, qualitative feedback and analysis may fall through the cracks. Check back after a certain period of time to ensure the action items have been completed.

Hopefully, by that point, you’ll have new feedback and insights to share, based on your latest round of customer interviews.

Summary

  • Share your findings with other team members to get their take on your data
  • Create a product council: customers that get insights into your product roadmap and provide input on a product before it is built/released.
  • Include your whole GTM team in your customer interviews: marketers, product managers, designers, sales, and engineers.
  • If everyone agrees the findings are valid, share them with the worker/team that would take action based on them:
  • EX: product/dev teams if findings are on features, sales/marketing if findings are on messaging, etc
  • Decide what specific actions will be taken as a result of the feedback
  • Check-in with teams after a specific period of time to ensure actions are executed

Checklist

What to Do After Your Interviews

  • Gather summaries of your interviews (write these after each session)
  • Look at your summaries as a whole to see if patterns emerge
  • Look for points that came up in multiple interviews
  • Identify the subjects that provided the most useful feedback
  • Identify the most surprising thing you learned
  • Be realistic about whether the trends you're seeing are strong enough to draw conclusions
  • Make a note of anything you'd like to do differently in future interviews
  • Establish a regular cadence of interviews going forward
  • Share your findings with your team members
  • Determine as a team whether action should be taken, based on your findings
  • Follow up with your action steps in the future to be sure they're completed