How to Interview Customers

Henry Ford almost certainly never said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” But the point is correct, nonetheless.

If you ask customers what they want, they will suggest incremental improvements to what they are doing today. ?For example, if someone spends their day completing filling out forms, they might suggest how to auto-complete the forms faster. What they won’t suggest is a new business process to eliminate the forms altogether. This is simply the way most of us are wired. This is one of the main reasons entrepreneurs and product managers fail to get the critical market input needed to build innovative products and services.

Ask the Right Questions

Product and marketing people have been conditioned to query customers using multiple choice surveys and questionnaires. ?So, when building new products, the most natural thing to do is to craft a list of questions that describe the problem and offer several options about how to solve it. Sounds reasonable, right? ?I mean, who knows the problem better than the customer? So, why doesn’t this work? ?First and foremost, this method assumes you already know the customer’s problem. Handed a given scenario, an survey respondent will try to provide the best answer to the question, not to the problem they have. ?There is no option for the customer to offer any insights besides picking from your pre-selected (but likely flawed) options.

Case in point. Several years ago, I was working with a young startup building a product designed to help organizations plan and deploy data networks. ?An outside agency was enlisted to survey potential customers on a wide variety of product feature dilemmas. For example, customers were asked which elements of network design planning were most challenging, such as sourcing networking components, validating whether network components were interoperable, calculating network load, etc. The questionnaire was extensive and was presented to a broad range of companies of different sizes, across multiple market verticals.

The startup analyzed the results of the survey by tallying up the results and calculating a score for each answer. Based on the results of the survey, the startup spent approximately six months building an MVP (minimally viable product). Meetings were then organized with all the survey respondents, to present the product ‘they had asked for’ and to arrange for trial rollouts.?

Guess what? Not even one of the 20+ respondents wanted to trial the product. Why? Two reasons; the survey made broad assumptions that didn’t enable the customers to accurately provide feedback. The customers didn’t experience the problem as described in the survey at all.?Secondly, the results were simply tallied up and averaged without giving precedence to the more insightful customers. The result was months of wasted opportunity. The team eventually regrouped and built a successful product, but not without a lot of aggravation and customer disappointment, to say nothing of the squandered investment.

But if asking customers what they want doesn’t work, how can you get the input you need to make sure you do it right the first time?

Pursue Editors, Not Authors

The critical insight here is that people are poor authors, but they are good editors. ?Which means, if you ask the right questions the right way, you will get valuable answers. ?One way to do this is to ask open-ended questions. But not through questionnaires. You need to interview customers. This is the most practical method to get the information you need to build your product. Of course, it is harder to interpret the results of open-ended interviews, and they are also susceptible to biases, most prominently the confirmation bias , by which you give more credence to customers who agree with your initial assumptions. So you need to be smart.

Here are some important tips for getting the input you need to ‘do it right the first time.’

1. Interview customers face to face (or at least via high-quality videoconferencing) so you can gauge body language, which is a critical part of human interaction.
2. Start with a short definition of the problem as you see it. Gauge the customer’s response. Does your message resonate? ?Most people want to be helpful, so they are unlikely to disagree with you outright. You need to read between the lines and use emotional intelligence to see if you are on the right track. Do you see head nodding? Furrowed brows? Confused looks? Gauge body language and verify your message is on track before moving to the next stage.
3. Factor in the possibility that the interviewee may not have the problem you describe, or they may see it in different terms. Probe for more information about how they do the task or operation you plan to disrupt, to locate the disconnect. Be sure you are on the same page before moving forward. For example, if you are building a product to help salespeople track daily sales activities, make sure your customer considers this a problem. ?If they don’t, probe for related pains. If you can’t identify any related problem, thank the interviewee and move on to another customer. ?If you can’t find customers that have the problem you describe, it is likely a sign that your product is not needed. ?It is better to know this early, before you invest considerable resources building a product no one wants to buy. Rare is the product that is so innovative that nobody wants it until they experience it on their own.
4. Once you have alignment on the problem, present your solution in general terms. Describe what you plan to do to solve the pain you have just uncovered. For example, if you want to solve the salesperson’s problem, describe the business process flow, explain how the person would use your solution, and how it would interact with their existing tools, like CRM and project management software. Make sure the flow makes sense to both of you before moving on. The key element here is being able to listen and internalize what you are being told.
5. Be sure to incorporate customer feedback into your subsequent questions. For example, if the customer said your approach wouldn’t work, probe to find out why and figure out what would work. This line of questioning helps uncover critical gaps in your current product definition. ?This is the stage where you uncover the golden nuggets that fill in the missing details you need to finish your product definition. So, don’t rush this step, spend the time you need to get it right.
6. Ask open-ended questions but provide a framework. In our example, you could ask the salesperson to describe how they spend a typical workday. Ask ‘what if’ follow-up questions to clarify. ?For example, ask “what if you were able to receive notifications prioritized by ‘likelihood to close business?’ ?How would that change your quality of life?” Help the customer visualize the new process and probe for excitement. ?Encourage the customer to ask you questions. Turn the interview into a dialogue. When you sense excitement, you will know you are on to something. This is the aha moment you are looking for.
7. Finally, remember that not all customer feedback is created equal. Identify those customers who really have a pain and would invest in your product. Put the laggards and tire kickers aside so they don’t cloud your judgment. (Check out the article “How to Identify a Design Partner ” for more on selecting the right people to work with at this stage.

It goes without saying that doing this right requires practice and experience, so work with people who can guide you and coach you to do it right the first time. ?To schedule a free 30-minute consultation about how to do it right the first time, click?here .

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