The Secret Sauce for Interviewing Customers
By: Jill Ebstein
Tags: Consulting, Customer Experience, Business, Feedback, Market Research

BUSINESS

The Secret Sauce for Interviewing Customers

Unsplash photo: Austen Distel

I am a believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule and am pretty sure I’ve clocked the time to say something meaningful about how to interview customers and get the maximum feedback. I know this because I’ve also made every mistake in the book while I learned how to do better.

I have recently been asked the best way to achieve a well-conducted interview and decided it was time to pen a piece. I offer 4 simple rules and a few words of caution at the end on how you can unintentionally foil your best efforts:

Four basic rules

Always begin the interview with a slow pitch over home plate: Make your initial question is easy, open-ended, and comfortable for the respondent. Avoid, for example, discussing the internal workings of the team where people tend towards privacy. Avoid a long and complicated question. Our first goal is to put the respondent at ease.

Make your initial question is easy, open-ended, and comfortable for the respondent. Avoid, for example, discussing the internal workings of the team where people tend towards privacy. Avoid a long and complicated question. Our first goal is to put the respondent at ease. Alternate questions between long and short, qualitative, and quantitative if numbers are important to survey design. People have short attention spans, so keep it hopping. This is equivalent advice to writers who alternate short and long sentences or funny and serious content. If a respondent is bored, we can get “non-answers” where they say anything just to move the survey along. An experienced interviewer can feel it right away.

People have short attention spans, so keep it hopping. This is equivalent advice to writers who alternate short and long sentences or funny and serious content. If a respondent is bored, we can get “non-answers” where they say anything just to move the survey along. An experienced interviewer can feel it right away. Find and affirm the gems that you hear: Respondents are just like you and me. They want to be smart. Many are nervous when they begin the interview, hoping they will be able to field the questions. Everyone has something helpful to say. Your job as an interviewer is to hear it, mark it, and let them know you appreciate it.

Respondents are just like you and me. They want to be smart. Many are nervous when they begin the interview, hoping they will be able to field the questions. Everyone has something helpful to say. Your job as an interviewer is to hear it, mark it, and let them know you appreciate it. Place their feedback in context: It is helpful to tell the respondent why this is helpful. For example, “My client is considering their product road map and which products they should lead with. Your feedback is very helpful in their evaluation.” We all want to know that we matter and can have an impact in some small way.

Avoiding the pitfalls

Unfortunately, I know from previous experience where it is easy for an interview to go off the rails. The most common mistakes are to:

Make the questions too long and complicated: Any time you need to explain something in a timed call, you are taking away from hearing more from the customer. Keep it simple.

This also means paying attention to survey design. Don’t combine factors in one question as you aim to reduce the total number of questions. All you’ve done is to consolidate them. So, for example, “How did you view your services experience, and does the help desk and the auto-installation work as promised?” There is simply too much to respond to, and the respondent will fatigue.

Not respecting the respondent’s time: My rule of thumb is that conversations need to be 25 to 30 minutes maximum if it is a survey designed for win/loss feedback, customer satisfaction, or message testing. More than that is greedy and risks irritating the respondent. Keep your promise about duration and manage the interview accordingly.

Build and maintain trust: I stay away from questions that pry into pricing and competitive bids, for example. I am not trying to get the “dirt” but rather glean information related to how my client is performing. I might ask whether my client was competitively priced or whether their offering measured up to what is available in the marketplace. A respondent will hear from those questions that it is about self-improvement. I might ask who in the organization championed my client or believes in my client’s offering but I won’t ask who were the detractors because that would be deemed negative news.