Have You Talked to Your Customers Lately?

Transcription

1 DIGITAL TELEPATHY Have You Talked to Your Customers Lately? A 7-Step Guide to Enterprise Customer Interviews.

2 Table of Contents 00. INTRODUCTION 01. BUILD YOUR TEAM 02. CREATE A RESEARCH PLAN 03. NARROW YOUR FOCUS 04. RECRUIT PARTICIPANTS 05. CONDUCT INTERVIEWS 06. SYNTHESIZE RESULTS 07. SHARE INSIGHTS

3 00. Introduction Talking to your customers is the best possible way to validate your assumptions. The primary difference between a customer and a user is that a customer gives you money. If you re interested in gaining powerful insights about purchase triggers then read on! Customer interviews are a powerful tool for discovering what buyers need to make a purchase decision. These can pair well with user interviews that may inform your product roadmap. Consider sharing this ebook with others to ensure a high-level of involvement from your core project team.

4 01. Build The Right Team Cross-functional representation is essential to your success. Bring in team members from Product Marketing, Product Management, Design, and Development. Including the right people early on will keep your project on track and increase buy-in to the recommendations that come from the interviews. Since your hopeful team members are likely to be very busy and have other responsibilities, be sure to communicate the time commitment when recruiting for this project.

5 Hypothesis: Assumptions: 02. Write a Research Plan Agreement on goals will ensure a smooth process and improve results. A research plan will help your team communicate the purpose of the interviews to outside stakeholders and keep you on track during the process. If you ve previously created proto-personas then you probably already have many assumptions documented. But you know what ass uming does, right? VALIDATING ASSUMPTIONS SHOULD ALWAYS BE A PRIMARY GOAL OF CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS.

6 03. Narrow Your Focus??? Refine your research plan so you aren t asking impossible questions or undertaking a project with no real value. Goals? How do you intend on applying your research? Is the output a new release of features, an updated persona list, or a revised editorial calendar??? Be honest. Your goals and questions must facilitate your intended output. KEEP YOUR RESEARCH FOCUSED BY MAPPING INTERVIEW QUESTIONS TO GOALS.

7 04. Recruit Participants Proper screening will reduce wasted time and increase interview quality. You are spending considerable human capital to conduct these interviews, and you may even be paying participants. Whether or not you have an existing database of customers, you should still screen participants to find people who best match the use-case you re trying to validate.

8 04. Recruit Participants Write a screener Every question in your screener must have a single purpose: to screen out participants you don t want. Put the questions that are most likely to screen people out at the start of the survey and work your way down. Distribute your screener You may need to distribute your screener to dozens (even hundreds) of people to find a sample size of willing and qualified participants. Aim for 5 or 6 people per round of interviews. Confirm and schedule interviews These discussions may require a Non-Disclosure Agreement or other forms of legal protection for your company or the participants. Take care of legalities first. Then schedule interviews in-person, online, or however. WRITE YOUR OWN SCREENER USING THIS TEMPLATE FROM GOOGLE VENTURES MICHAEL MARGOLIS. KEEP THIS MANTRA: IF I INTERVIEWED ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD I LEARN SOMETHING DIFFERENT? A REMINDER PHONE CALL THE DAY BEFORE WILL HELP REDUCE NO SHOWS.

9 05. Talk to Your Customers DOs Start off easy by asking questions about their background to build a rapport. Get specific on events and scenarios. Ask open-ended questions about goals and experiences. Mix methods: listen and watch. Allow for tangential discussion. Customer interviews should be a dialogue not an interrogation. Have a conversation, don t follow a script. Facilitate a conversation by creating a discussion guide that includes the types of questions you ll ask along with the topics you hope to cover. DON Ts Ask leading questions. Ask about the future. Correct what participants say. You want to learn their story, not how well they conform to yours. Disclose your hypothesis or what you need to learn to do your job. Let people design the product... that s your job. If you get a feature suggestion, simply ask How would that help you? to understand the underlying need.

10 06. Synthesize the Results This is the time for reflection, summarization, and comparison. The goal is to identify common traits and behaviors among the customers you interviewed, and plot your customers along a spectrum line. For example: technical/non-technical, novice/expert, non-funded/funded, lazy/ambitious. This exercise will uncover patterns. Some individuals will be clustered together across multiple spectrums congratulations you have a persona!

11 07. Share Your Insights Give Customer X a face and name. Visualize the results of your customer research in a deck or a poster. A well-designed document can help to rally your entire organization behind a customer s needs and wants. Approaching business challenges with the customer s perspective in mind will help you make decisions that are better for business.

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