Michele Hansen: Deploy Empathy, A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

Customer interview

Empathy is a learnable skill

Your time is too valuable to spend it creating things people don’t want.

As defined by design strategist Indi Young in Practical Empathy, empathy is “about understanding how another person thinks, and acknowledging [their] reasoning and emotions as valid, even if they differ from your own understanding.”

It is worth taking a moment to differentiate between empathy, sympathy, and solution-based responses.

Actively listening to customers is a resource that many companies overlook.

The neuroscience of listening

Customers we interview tend to become our most vocal supporters.

Being listened to makes people feel happy, and the person talking associates those positive feelings with the person and concept they’re talking about. In the case of a customer interview, that means those happy feelings get transferred to you and in turn, your company.

Why I wrote this book

Two gaps in the existing (and wonderful) body of work on customer research. The first is specific words, phrases, and scripts to use when talking to customers, whether in an interview setting or support setting. Second, with the exception of The User Experience Team of One, many of the books on user research are written with large, well-resourced teams in mind.

Building products and features that people don’t want is painful and if people knew how to talk to customers and potential customers to get useful information, they wouldn’t have to go through that.

How this book is structured

Customer interviews are very, very different from the interviews you might observe in daily life. It’s more like how a therapist talks to their patients than a journalist on TV.

Key Frameworks

Everything is a process

Three key frameworks that are referenced throughout the book:

The core questions to answer in an interview.
The three dimensions of a process: Functional, social, and emotional.
Valuable, usable, viable, and feasible.

A combination of tasks rolled up together. They are processes. And they take different amounts of time, require different tools, and have different amounts of complexity.

Sometimes people think they need to solve the entire process in order to create something others would buy. This is sometimes the case, but due to the complexity that goes into even “simple” tasks, making just one step easier, faster, or cheaper can make a huge difference for people.

People are more willing to pay to solve problems that are frequent, and people are more willing to pay to solve problems that are complex, time consuming, expensive to get wrong, or otherwise frustrating in some way.

Every task is a process. Every process is situational.

The core questions

The scripts build off a set of core questions: What are they trying to do overall? What are all of the steps in that process? Where are they now? Where does the problem you are solving fit in that process? Where in that process do they spend a lot of time or money? How often do they experience this problem? What have they already tried?

What Kathy Sierra in Badass: Making Users Awesome calls the “Compelling Context.” It’s the big reason why someone does something in the first place.

Acting with Technology by Bonnie Nardi and Victor Kaptelinin.

Functional, social, and emotional

Discovering motivations is not enough for a successful product, though. Toward that end, you’ll also learn how to probe the commercial viability of those problems to understand where you might focus and how you might price by asking about: How often they experience it. What they’re currently paying to solve it. How long it takes them.

Valuable, usable, viable, and feasible

According to product expert Marty Cagan, in order for a product to be successful, it needs to be valuable for the customer, usable by the customer, viable for the company to support commercially, and feasible for the company to build.

Valuable: If the product isn’t something the customer needs, they won’t buy it.
Usable: If the customer can’t figure out how to use it, they won’t use it (even if the value is there).
Viable: If it doesn’t make money, the company will shut it down.
Feasible: If it isn’t possible for the company to build, it will never get off the ground.

Crucially, this evaluation happens after the interview. During the interview, you should imagine yourself as a sponge that is there to absorb whatever the person says.

Getting Started

You—yes you—can do this

“Male socialization is basically a decades-long training program in how not to be an empathetic listener.”

I had to learn how to submerge myself in what someone is saying. Not to interrupt. To leave pauses. To mirror. I’ve had to learn how to show empathy, to myself and others. To validate how someone else feels. To build rapport through listening. To let them find the answers, rather than sharing my own ideas.

Learn how to interview: A Step-by-step guide

Great products not only solve the big problem but little steps that people didn’t realize could be easier, and finding those “I never really thought about it …” moments is key.

Depending on how well understood a problem is, you may need to do further “research loops” to narrow the scope of a problem. For a complex problem or the discovery stage, that is almost expected.

What you want to listen for is:

What is the underlying problem/need this product solved for them?
How often do they experience the problem?
Were they previously paying to solve that problem?
What did they use?
How much time does this problem take for them?
How important is the problem for them? If they don’t solve it, or it’s solved poorly, what are the consequences?
Who else was involved in the decision?

And you want to probe the following dimensions of the problem and decision process:

Functional (i.e., the literal problem the product solves).

Emotional (how they will feel if the problem is/is not solved, and how they feel about the new solution).

Social whether they talked to others about the purchase before or after, whether there were any social implications of how the problem was solved).

When Should You Do Interviews?

Interviews or numbers?

Project-based research is helpful for answering specific questions, like “why do people keep asking support about [this]?” Ongoing research is helpful to building out a general bank of customer understanding and informing broader decision-making.

Quantitative and qualitative research are not an either/or and instead should be used together as part of a broader effort to understand the business and the customers that fuel it.

Looking at data is one tool in your toolbox, surveys are another, and interviews yet another (of many different research tools in that toolbox).

Project-based research

Project-based research has a narrowly defined question, a defined goal, and a defined timeline.

Usually a project-based effort will involve a combination of quantitative and qualitative research.

Once we have a quantitative picture and have confidence that this problem is at enough of a scale and business impact to warrant investigation, we then set up interviews.

The fundamentals are the same: identify a question, get a sense for the size and value of the problem, talk to people, iterate, and repeat.

How many people should you talk to?

For any discrete problem, the general rule is to find five people to talk to before making decisions.

The seminal “Voice of the Customer” paper by Abbie Griffin and John Hauser in 1993 found that twenty to thirty people were needed to surface 90 to 95 percent of customer needs and twelve people to surface 80 percent.

It’s important to speak to a diverse group of customers or potential customers, both for ethical reasons and for business opportunity reasons.

Research loops

If you hear completely different processes and tools on each call with limited overlap, it’s okay. It simply means you have a broad research scope.

Ongoing research

Ongoing research is research that you do every day as part of adding to your ever-expanding and evolving understanding of customer needs.

At Stripe, teams might conduct both targeted research about specific questions and broad-based research to “get a gut check about how people are feeling about the product,” according to Stripe product manager Theodora Chu.

On an everyday basis, I suggest running short, one-or two-question surveys that are integrated into the product experience.

One of the crucial parts of Jobs to Be Done interviews is figuring out how someone overcame the inertia of their existing solution and switched to something new.

Some questions to consider using in a one-question survey that are both easy to answer and highly insightful include: What did you use before you used [product]? How did you come across [product]?

New customer interviews are particularly helpful for finding marketing ideas, as people may be seeking out your product for reasons you didn’t realize.

Talking to happy customers who pay every month without complaint is sometimes a mental leap. Talking to people who’ve canceled seems intuitive to most people since you want to know how you can get them back or prevent more people from canceling. But interviewing people who are happily renewing every month or year?

The more happy customer interviews you do, the fewer cancelation ones you’ll need to do, because there will simply be fewer people canceling.

Recruiting Participants

Reddit and forums

What if you’re building something new and don’t have any users to talk to? How exactly do you find people to talk to? Where? Reddit (and other niche forums).

Step 1: Determine who you want to talk to, and who you don’t.
Step 2: Research subreddits for that topic.
Step 3: Check that the post you’re about to make is allowed by that subreddit or forum.
Step 4: Write your post.
Step 5: Sort through applicants.
Step 6: Conduct the calls.
Step 7: Send the gift card while you’re on the phone at the end.
Step 8: Send them a follow-up thank-you note within the next day.

Twitter

Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman’s Sales Safari course teaches people how to find digital watering holes where their potential customers are already talking about their problems and their opinions of competitors.

On Twitter, the key will be to find people who experience the problem and have already spoken about it.

When you find someone who tweets about how a competitor product frustrates them in some way, you can reply or DM them.

A successful ask on LinkedIn will call on people’s desires to be helpful and feel like they have valuable advice for others.

Your message should be carefully crafted. The more human, the better, and the more personalized, the better.

For your own messages, the points to hit would be:

Who you are.
Why you want to talk to them (ideally phrased in a complimentary way — note Forster’s use of “innovative publishers”).
What you’re hoping for from them.

Facebook groups and email lists

Facebook groups and email lists are another great place to recruit, though they can be much more private and harder to find.

The formula is:

Who you want to talk to and what about Introduction to what you’re hoping to learn about.
What people would need to do.
What the incentive is, if you’re providing one. (If you aren’t asking people about a specific and current pain, an incentive is more likely to be necessary.)

Email

Email outreach will vary based on who you are trying to reach and when. Writing a good recruitment email will take refinement and A/B testing on your end.

The highest I’ve ever gotten my response rates is ten percent, so it’s okay if you don’t have a high response rate. This is a volume. Titles add an air of credibility and importance to the request. The shorter the email, the better.

The formula:

Who you are.
A specific amount of time you want to talk to them.
Why you want to talk to them.
When you want to talk to them.
What you will give them [if applicable].

How to Talk So People Will Talk

Validate them

Use a gentle tone of voice.
Validate.
Leave pauses for them to fill.
Mirror and summarize their words.
Don’t interrupt.
Use simple wording.
Ask for clarification, even when you don’t need it.
Don’t explain anything.
Don’t negate them in any way.
Let them be the expert.
Use their words and pronunciation.
Ask about time and money already spent.

Journalistic interviewing, motivational interviewing, and negotiation-based interviewing all bear similarities to user interviewing, yet also have significant differences.

Customer interviews, by contrast, are all about diving into how the other person perceives an experience, and intentionally suspending the desire to validate your own ideas.

Books on product development often talk about validation: validating ideas, validating prototypes, validating business models.

In a customer interview, you use validation even when you don’t necessarily agree with what they say, or even if what they say sounds absurd to you. It does not mean that you agree with them. It is instead a way of recognizing that what they think and do is valid from their perspective. You cannot break that bubble of trust, ever. Even when something wacky happens — which it can.

Agreeing or disagreeing will remind them that you’re a human being with opinions and judgments, and the trust will start to melt away. You almost want them to forget you’re a person.

The next time a friend or family member shares a problem with you and does not explicitly ask you for advice, say “That makes sense,” or another one of the validating statements above rather than offering a solution.

Leave pauses for them to fill

Terry Gross’s interview strategy is to ask a question, and then to wait and wait and wait at least three long beats until it is uncomfortable. “The other person will fill the silence, and what they fill it with will often be the most interesting part of the interview”.

One of the ways people make a typical conversation flow is by adding these sorts of little prompting words when someone doesn’t reply immediately.

In an interview, you need to avoid prompting as best you can, lest you influence the person’s answer.

To get the answers you need about the customer’s process, you need to create a safe, judgment-free environment. You need to hand the stage entirely over to the customer and talk as little as possible. And leaving silences without prompting is one of the ways you can do that.

Mirror and summarize their words

Repeating words back at someone and rephrasing what they’ve said has the magical power of encouraging them to elaborate.

It’s a tactic that therapists and negotiators use all the time.

This is a combination of two conversation tactics: mirroring and summarizing. Mirroring is repeating what someone has said, and summarizing is when you rephrase what they have said (and sometimes label their feelings).

Don’t interrupt

One of the tenets of active listening is right in the name: listening. Listening without any interruptions is the foundation of active listening.

Use simple wording

Jargon may have a place to imply your own in-group association with a particular industry and build rapport, yet I would caution you against using it unless you are certain the other person would understand it.

Ask for clarification, even when you don’t need it

In a customer interview, you will do a lot of things that may not come naturally in an everyday conversation. You pause for longer than is comfortable. You purposefully deflect conversation away from yourself and your own opinions. You use phrases that show understanding rather than sharing your own similar experiences.

Many adults feel like they seem smarter when sharing their own knowledge rather than asking clarification questions. Yet that’s the precise opposite of what you should do in a customer interview.

Your goal is to get the customer talking and get as much detail as possible (on the subject at hand). Restating what they’ve said shows you’re listening, shows that you’re interested, and helps you dive to deeper levels.

Don’t explain anything or get defensive

When someone says, “Why does it work like this?” you should reply with a gentle, curious follow-up question that allows you to learn more about their process.

Can you tell me how you expected it to work? I’m curious, can you walk me through what you expected to happen? What were you hoping to use this for?

Build on what they say

The next time, try building on what the other person says and digging deeper into their perspective. “Yes, and …” or, “It sounds like that made you think …” are two phrases you can use to build off of what they say.

Let them be the expert

Everyone is the expert of their own experience, even if it isn’t factually correct. Your goal in an interview is to learn how they see and experience something. It is not to help them be right, or share your own version of what is right.

The next time you find yourself tempted to correct someone, ask yourself if it really matters and if they need to be corrected.

Ask about past or current behavior

When you’re listening to customers, potential customers, or clients, you want to find out what their problems are. You want to find their needs. You want to find out where they’re struggling. You want to know if they would buy it and how much they would pay.

You can’t literally ask them what they want or whether they would pay for something.

Ask the customer to predict their future needs or their behavior.

It’s also cognitively difficult to answer a big, vague question like “What do you need?” or predict the future after hearing a question like “Will you use this?” Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future.

Highlight (orange) – 36. Ask about past or current behavior > Page 133 · Location 1735

Instead of asking for predictions, ask and listen for facts, like time and money spent. Ask people what they have actually done in the past or present, rather than asking them to predict their future needs or behaviors. Through their explanations, you will learn about where they struggle and where they’re willing to spend money. Time, manual solutions, multiple tools, and money are all signs of pain points.

Here’s how you ask about things that imply struggle: How long does it take to do [X]? What was it like to get started with [X]? Can you tell me more about the people you need to work with to get [X] done? Compared to what you expected, how long did it take to [get started/integrate it/etc]? Can you walk me through the different tools do you use to do [X]? Thinking about the whole process to do [X] you’ve told me about, what takes the most time?

A product needs to be valuable for the customer, usable by the customer, viable for you to support commercially, and feasible for you to build. But you may have noticed a problem with those lenses: Customers only know the first two, and only you know the last two. I think this is why people can be skeptical of customer ideas.

Have you ever asked someone “Would you use this?” or “Would you pay for this?” Do you feel like you got helpful, reliable information back? The next time you talk to a customer or potential customer, ask them instead about what they’ve used (and paid for) in the past.

Be a rubber duck

To build a product, you need to know why they experience the problem and what they’ve already tried in order to know how to help.

The next time someone shares a problem with you, notice whether you jump to proposing a solution. Try instead to use the active listening skills.

Interview Scripts

Interview Preparation

Discovery interviews, when you’re exploring a new idea and are trying to understand a problem better.

New customer interviews, to figure out why someone switched to your product and how you can market it better to get more customers.

Long-time customer interviews, to figure out what makes people keep paying you.

Cancellation interviews, to figure out why they canceled Interactive interviews, to test a prototype, wireframe, or live product with someone.

Prioritization interviews, to help you understand which problems are high-pain and underserved.

The overall framework for interviews:

What they’re trying to do overall.
The steps they take to do that.
What they’ve already tried.
Where they spend time and money throughout the entire process.
How often they experience the problem.
How long it takes them.

I’ve found that people are much more willing to be open on an audio call than they are on video.

In some ways, you want the other person to forget you’re a person with your own thoughts and judgments. Doing interviews over audio removes the body language variable and can be a shortcut to deep insights.

For a discrete, well-scoped problem, the minimum number of people to interview is five.

Interviews often veer into territory you hadn’t expected. Indeed, that can be the sign of a great interview!

It’s also common for someone to answer one question in the course of another question. If that happens, don’t feel like you need to ask that other question.

If the customer requests a feature during the interview, it’s important to somehow take note of it in a way you’ll be able to access in the future.

In a world where so many companies are actively disdainful of their customers, listening to customers is a competitive advantage.

Most user research literature recommends doing interviews in pairs. People pick up different things, and one partner may notice something that the other one doesn’t.

I encourage you to do no more than one or two interviews per day.

You can never sell someone during a customer interview.

The goal of a customer discovery interview is to figure out whether the problem you think exists does exist for other people, and then whether your conceptualization of the problem matches your potential customers’ conceptualization of the problem. You also want to get a sense for the different steps involved and the internal/external people involved, which can be make-or-break.

Discovery Script

The key goals of this interview are usually along the lines of:

Do people experience this problem I think I’ve noticed?
How frequently do they experience that problem/process?
How painful is that problem/process?
What have they tried to solve that problem/process?
How are they currently paying to solve that problem/process (money/time)?
Who else inside/outside their organization is involved with this process?

Customer/problem discovery script template. Remember to use lots of validating statements, mirror what they say, and summarize what you hear.

Starting questions. Before we get started, I just wanted to ask if you had any questions for me?

Substantive questions. I’m interested to learn more about how you [problem you’re looking to solve.] Can you walk me through the last time you needed to do [X]? Are there any tools you tried but didn’t really work that well? Would you mind telling me how much you pay for those tools? How many team members on your end are involved with [process]? Is there anyone outside of your team who is involved with [this process]? What is your least favorite part about [this process]? This is a little bit of a silly question, so bear with me. If you could change any part of this [process] with a magic wand, what would it be?

The “reaching for the door question”. Is there anything else you think I should know?

When you’re actually ready to get off the phone. I just have one more question if that’s okay. Is there anyone else you think I should talk to about this?

New Customer Script

This is called a “switch” interview in Jobs to Be Done literature, and the goal is to be able to diagram the process someone goes through from becoming aware they had a problem to solve => deciding to solve that problem => deciding to use a product (i.e., switching from one product to another).

The goals of this interview: What was the journey they went through? How did they discover your product? What prompted them to switch from one provider/tool/process to yours? So far, are they satisfied with that decision?

So when did you start looking for something new to [solve problem]? Before you started using [product], what were you hoping it would solve?

Before you decided to use [product], were there any other alternatives you looked into?

Long-Time Customer Script

The goal of this interview is to find the customers who are happy and figure out why they are happy so you can find more people with similar use cases that are well served by your product.

When you encounter feature requests, the key is to dive into why they would need that feature in the first place. After you get that context, you can give them details on your company’s side: for example, if it’s already on your roadmap or already scheduled for release. If it’s beyond the scope for your company, find a nice way to close the topic without shutting them down.

When they suggest a feature.

Can you walk me through a scenario where you would use that?
When was the last time you needed to do [X]?
What do you currently use for that?
What do you currently pay for that?

A bit of a silly question here. If you had a magic wand and could change anything about [product], what would it be? [Pause]

Canceled Customer Script

Cancellation interviews are the most challenging interviews. Do not start with them if you’re new to interviewing.

For someone who has personally worked on a product (whether individually or as part of a team), someone downgrading/canceling/not upgrading hits deeper and hits differently. This is especially the case for founders.

A customer who cancels can be a sign that something was wrong in the marketing that attracted someone with a use case that wasn’t a fit for the product. Instead of trying to win them back, the goal of this interview is to figure out what their use case was and how they came to the product so you can stop attracting people with use cases that aren’t a good fit.

I encourage you to balance cancelation interviews with happy customer interviews to give you a broader perspective on the product.

When you ask people to do this call, aim for twenty to twenty-five minutes. (Schedule it for half an hour, and purposefully give them time back.)

Validating statements are more important than ever in this interview. It’s critical that you just listen and do not get defensive or interrupt them in any way, or go into any explanations of what you intended when you build something.

I appreciate your generosity in helping us understand what went wrong so we can prevent other people from having the disappointing experience you’ve had.

What they’ll use/do next Do you know what you will replace [our product] with? Can I ask how you came across [that product]?

Interactive Interview Script

Get your product in front of people. Get your prototypes, your drawings, your products that have been around for five years, get them all in front of people. And don’t just ask about the product. Don’t ask them if they would use it or if they would buy it. Instead ask about the decision process, the other stakeholders involved, and what other complications might come up — the parts that have nothing to do with technology.

A key way this differs from other types of interviews is that it’s more observational, with the person driving the flow. Most of the session is spent listening to their narration and asking things like, “Is that what you expected to happen?” and “Can you tell me more about why you’d want it to do that/why you thought it would do that?”

You will learn so much from this kind of test if you can manage to tamp down your desire to rescue them from confusion in the moment.

I have noticed that sometimes “confusion” is something inflicted upon us by an external force, whereas whether something “makes sense” assumes our inner concept of what is sensical is the correct one.

Prioritization Interview Script

In the same way that asking customers about their problems can seem like a strange concept at first, I want to tell you that you can also ask customers to prioritize for you.

Card sorting is a way to ask a customer to prioritize different problems.

It can be used as a tool to get a better sense of which problems are currently underserved and which might have the highest willingness to pay.

I suggest doing this with customers you’ve already talked to.

The “Reaching for the Door” question

When I plan customer interviews, I plan that the first half of the interview will be spent on questions in my script and leave the second half completely open for what comes after what I call the “reaching for the door” question.

This question is a famous question among user researchers and comes from the medical world. As Steve Portigal relates in Interviewing Users, people will save the most crucial information for the last moment.

This question is simple, and you ask it in the most harmless voice you can possibly muster: “Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I learned a lot from you today. (breath) Is there anything else you think I should know?”

Don’t prompt by saying things like “Anything about process, or tools, or feedback, or …” JUST. WAIT. Do not fill the space. Do not prompt.

Sometimes it does require asking a few times in different ways.

Is there anything else you want to add? Is there anything you hoped we’d talk about? I just want to check, were there any questions or thoughts you had for me? Is there anyone else you think I should talk to about this?

Interviews can be so powerful because many people aren’t used to being listened to.

The interview script serves two purposes: it directs the interview and helps you answer your questions, and it also primes the person to think about this topic and establishes trust that you are willing to listen to them.

A grammatically clumsy question asked in a caring way beats out a grammatically perfect question asked in a cold way every time. Ask your questions gently and curiously, like you might a grandparent about a picture of themselves as a child.

How to ask people how much they would pay

One of the things you most want to know when creating a product is whether anyone will pay for it. The thing is, like asking “What are your problems?”, asking someone, “Would you pay for this?” or, “What would you pay for this?” rarely leads to a useful answer. It yields an opinion — perhaps an opinion designed to protect the other person socially as they may not want to hurt you — and what you need are facts.

At a high level, the way to ask someone what they’d pay without asking them what they’d pay is to ask what they’re currently paying.

One of my favorite tools to use during interviewing is a pain and frequency matrix.

The idea is to map all of the problems you hear on a two-by-two grid of pain and frequency. Problems that are highly painful — lots of time, people, or steps involved — and high frequency are our prime fishing groups for product ideas.

One of my favorite pricing guides is Patrick McKenzie’s “Pricing Low-Touch SaaS.”

Debugging interviews

Every interview is an adventure in its own right.

But sometimes they’re an adventure for reasons that aren’t so exciting.

This is far and away the most common interview problem: no-shows. When I worked in a larger company, about ten percent of interviewees wouldn’t show up.

I’ve found that my no-show rate went down significantly once I started recruiting personally and including my title in the email.

Let’s say you’ve planned for a half an hour interview but find both sides are running out of things to say after ten minutes.

It takes time to adjust to asking for details about things you’re already familiar with. Most educational systems and workplaces punish this kind of question-asking, so it makes sense if it feels like a strange concept to you.

It’s not uncommon to have someone be somewhat nervous.

Validating statements. “That makes sense” and “I can see why you’d do it that way” go such a long way to reassure someone who is feeling nervous about sharing their experiences.

Perhaps you’re asking questions about their overall goals and process and instead of getting the detail you’d hoped for, you’re getting very short answers back said in a hurried or clipped tone.

It sounds like this person has some burning questions and this was their primary motivation for taking the call. You should respect that and give them the space to get their questions answered. If you try to move them to the end of the call, the person may build up apprehension or frustration that their questions aren’t being answered, and it could reduce the overall quality of answers you get back.

By putting their questions first, you can still get to your questions, but you may have to take a circuitous route there.

Another issue can come up when it turns out that multiple team members are on a call. You may get a hunch about this in advance by seeing people confirm a forwarded event invitation, or it could be a surprise.

It’s impossible to truly interview in a group setting. Focus groups are helpful for seeing how people behave and make decisions in a group setting. If your product is generally sold to groups, this could be a good opportunity for you to learn about their decision-making process, roles, and interactions with other decision makers. However, it will not give you the kind of process-level depth that you’d get from talking to one person alone.

If group-level dynamics are helpful for you to understand, feel free to jump in. Just make sure you address their questions/motivations first.

Maybe you’re having the opposite problem of short answers, and you’re getting really long answers with lots of unrelated details.

Polite re-steering. “Thank you for telling me that. That makes sense. I’m wondering if we could go back to something you mentioned earlier. Could you tell me more about how you use [something on-topic]?”

What to do if the interviewee is mad about something.

Listen. Listen, listen, listen.
Establish your competence. “I can help you sort this out” is a helpful phrase to use here.
Solve their problem.
Solve your problem. Try to get to the root of where the misunderstanding came from.

Analyzing Interviews

Drawing a simple customer journey map

You might find it helpful to sketch the customer’s process or pain and frequency during the interview, or right after. However, you should never make business decisions after one interview.

If you’ve recorded your interviews, it can be both helpful and time saving to get them transcribed.

After you get the transcript back, you can read through it, highlighter in hand, and pull out key parts and phrases. You will want to pay attention to the core questions, functional/social/emotional dimensions, tools/processes used, as well as the specific phrasing and wording they use to describe those steps and struggles.

I suggest drawing a simple version of a customer journey map, which is a tool widely used by user researchers. The goal is to be able to draw out the different steps a customer goes through, and then for each step, identify the functional/social/emotional elements.

The Pain and Frequency Matrix

The more frequent and painful a problem is, the more likely someone will be willing to pay to solve it. That’s the underlying idea of the pain and frequency Matrix. It’s based on a matrix promoted by Des Traynor, cofounder of customer support software company Intercom and Jobs To Be Done advocate.

Traynor graphs problems by size versus frequency, but I prefer to use “pain.” I generally call it the pain and frequency matrix, and you can also think about it as a complexity and frequency, or time and frequency matrix, whichever clicks with you.

I suggest looking at the customer’s problem set both linearly as a step-by-step process, and also as a matrix. Using those tools together can help give you a more complete picture of what the problem/s is/are and how critical they are to a customer.

The pain and frequency matrix will tell you what problems are frequent and painful for people and are thus the things they’re most likely to be willing to buy.

What the pain and frequency matrix will tell you is which problems are the most acute.

Pulling It All Together: Sample Interview

Sample analysis

You may pull different actions and questions from the sample interview, and that’s okay. Everyone notices different things in interviews, and having someone else review your interviews will help you pull more out of them.

It’s important to differentiate between the process someone is going through to accomplish a goal and the process they go through regarding deciding to use a specific product. I encourage you to break down the goal – level process first, then the product-level process.

We may not like to admit it, but the reasons why we do and buy things go beyond their functional purposes. Emotions and social considerations are drivers, too.

Conclusion

For Founders

Feature requests as customer research

The formula is: Thank them, Ask for broader context, Use a deferential tense (could, would, might), and Use positive clarification words (curious, wondering). Try to use words that elicit explanation about the broader situation, like: context background broader goal/process big picture.

Sales, customer support, and customer research

Customer interviews are not customer support. If someone surfaces an issue or complaint, you should jot it down, tell them you’re taking note of it and will communicate it to the appropriate person/team/get it in the bug queue afterward, and then dive into why that problem presented a problem for the customer.

Sales is not customer research as well, but for an entirely different reason. On sales calls, it’s common to get into the problems that someone is solving, the tools they’ve used before or are evaluating, and why they might be looking to switch.

Sales is usually a low-trust setting: someone is trying to figure out whether your product is a fit. It’s a trust-building opportunity for sure, but it’s not by nature a relaxed setting, and it is therefore not appropriate to dive to the emotional level that you would in an interview.

On the flip side, customer interviews are not sales. This is probably the biggest mistake I see people making with customer research.

Customer support

The customer is not always right, but they are always right about their experience.

People are often afraid to say that a customer is annoyed, upset, or frustrated to them directly, because they’re afraid it will remind the person how upset they are. As Chris Voss explains in Never Split the Difference, labeling emotions in particular does the opposite: it helps defuse them.

Validate them as a person and the problem they’re having first. Without getting defensive.

Phrasing is really important here, and what you need to make sure to avoid is fake empathy — the kind you so often see in public apologies.

“I’m sorry you feel that way” is dismissive, while “This is frustrating” is validating.

People are also sometimes afraid to apologize, as if doing so means that everything the other person has done is right.

I urge you to try to distinguish between when someone is mad for a justifiable reason but comporting themselves appropriately (anger is a valid emotion and people are allowed to be mad) and when someone is being a bully.

A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers, Customer Interview, Deploy Empathy, MIchele Hansen