How To Ask The Right Questions In Customer Interviews

Customer interviews aren't just talking to people and asking random stuff.

You don’t set these up so you can pitch your idea. And it sure isn’t about asking what features they need.

People ask, “What are the right questions to ask in a customer interview?”?But there’s no actual way to answer that without doing the actual thing for you. It really depends on what you’re working on.

Since it's not possible to give you an exact answer, we'll go with principles.

Here are the 3 most important secrets that I use so I can ask the right things in my customer interviews:

1. Know the goal of the project

Before you start scheduling interviews, it’s important to plan your research. And part of the planning is defining the goal that you want to achieve with the research project.

These goals could be to:

Understand their behaviors and experience Improve their satisfaction Identify opportunities Test new ideas

To name a few.

Knowing the goal of your research project will help you come up with the right questions to ask.

If your goal is to improve satisfaction, then you’re going to ask current users about the experience of using your product. You’re not going to ask non-users about the same kinds of things.

If you want to understand their behaviors, then you’re going to ask about what they do in certain situations.

The big idea is to ask questions that are related to your goal.

2. Keep it casual

Making your interviewee comfortable is a must for effective interviews. Comfortable interviewees are more honest and candid, so you get to learn more of the right things.

But if you’re too robotic with how you ask questions, they could feel like they're being interrogated. Even with good rapport. So don't just throw questions at them one right after the other, going through your list or script.

It’s good to prepare an interview questionnaire before you run your interviews. But when you’re actually doing them, it’s best not to follow your script too much to keep it casual.?

Keep things casual by being a reactive interviewer. What this means is you respond naturally to their answers. Ask follow up questions and ask them to dig deeper into emotions or ideas.

The idea is to keep the interview as light as a conversation. Because it is a conversation, not a survey.

3. Ask for stories

People will give you hypothetical answers if you ask questions the wrong way.?

This happens when you ask questions that start with “How often do you…” or “Do you usually…” Those sort of questions.

They’ll respond with ideal behavior that they don’t actually do. Or false positives.

Personally, I don’t want false data, so I ask for specific stories. Stories force them to narrate actual things that happened in their lives. Not hypothetical or idealistic fluff.?

Asking for stories also eliminates the need for you to ask the right questions the right way. They just tell you what they do and what happened. Which are all important information.

So instead of asking, “Do you usually use this service?”, Ask “Could you tell me about the last time you used this service?”

That’s it! I’m sure with these 3 principles you’ll learn a lot more about your customers. Definitely more than if you get into calls trying to pitch them an idea.?

What are your secrets for better customer interviews? Share ‘em in the comments!

P.S. If you found this valuable, repost ??this for your product friends.

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