I am confused. Do you actually do user interviews?
Viktor Atanasov
11 replies
So I am trying to understand do people actually bother interviewing their users to see how their product is really being used? I thought this was the default approach, but I feel like a lot of people and SaaS businesses just use feedback boards, which is so different. User interviews definitely have some disadvantages as well, but curious to see what other people think?
Replies
Jan Kuzel@kuzeljan
I think most SaaS companies have some form of live touch with prospects and customers in form of demo calls, customer success calls, and sometimes basic interviews. What is probably not happening as much as it should are highly systematic customer interviews with a clear system, goals, and approach in place.
I recently did a round of 20 customer interviews for our B2B SaaS SatisMeter. To be honest, it was a massive pain (it took months from organizing it to final analysis), but at the same time incredibly rewarding as the insights changed our company direction and will have big implications on both product and marketing.
I constructed inter-connected databases in Notion to be able to analyze patterns easily
Made a super simple chart to have an easy overview of what I need to extract during the interview
We are a tool that provides in-app surveys, NPS, customer journey surveys, product micro surveys, and such ... but even I have to admit the level of feedback from customer interview is 10x of any short survey and perhaps very well done systematic interview is 100x of that.
What completely blows my mind is that I know SaaS companies that don't even use the most basic NPS survey, which is super helpful because the effort of using that is 100x less as it runs on autopilot once setup, but really is very rough in the level of feedback, it is the most basic form of customer feedback.
Better (and often bigger) companies extend the NPS to product surveys of different kinds to get much more value and also run the interview ... if you have a good setup of product surveys and systematic interviews then you're doing really well, but yea, it's rare and I do see it, but most often in mid-sized scale-ups with really smart people running the Product.
In summary, anyone who ever run customer interviews and tried to be really organized about it, designed the questions, record it all, did transcripts, extracted patterns, etc. will tell you how HUGELY difficult and time-consuming the process is ... that's why it's not done as much. For me especially the final step of identifying patterns in the midst of thousands of words in the transcript was just a huge mental mind fuck for me.
I might be biased as I work in a survey company, but I'd say properly targeted and designed product surveys should be mandatory, It's an hour of work at most, and then it can run like that for years and keep giving. Customer interviews are a completely different beast, you go from one hour to hundreds of hours ... and its also difficult to outsource it, at least the design of questions and the final analysis, as it requires deep knowledge of your product and the market as a whole to read between the lines properly.
I highly recommend it though, especially for companies in a competitive market and with tricky Product-Market Fit. There is a chance it will flip everything upside down and save the company years of operating costs and time going in a direction it shouldn't have.
If you have some questions about my process with customer interviews or how to get at least proper basic feedback super easily with product surveys - send me connect with message on https://www.linkedin.com/in/jank...
Made a super simple chart to have an easy overview of what I need to extract during the interview
We are a tool that provides in-app surveys, NPS, customer journey surveys, product micro surveys, and such ... but even I have to admit the level of feedback from customer interview is 10x of any short survey and perhaps very well done systematic interview is 100x of that.
What completely blows my mind is that I know SaaS companies that don't even use the most basic NPS survey, which is super helpful because the effort of using that is 100x less as it runs on autopilot once setup, but really is very rough in the level of feedback, it is the most basic form of customer feedback.
Better (and often bigger) companies extend the NPS to product surveys of different kinds to get much more value and also run the interview ... if you have a good setup of product surveys and systematic interviews then you're doing really well, but yea, it's rare and I do see it, but most often in mid-sized scale-ups with really smart people running the Product.
In summary, anyone who ever run customer interviews and tried to be really organized about it, designed the questions, record it all, did transcripts, extracted patterns, etc. will tell you how HUGELY difficult and time-consuming the process is ... that's why it's not done as much. For me especially the final step of identifying patterns in the midst of thousands of words in the transcript was just a huge mental mind fuck for me.
I might be biased as I work in a survey company, but I'd say properly targeted and designed product surveys should be mandatory, It's an hour of work at most, and then it can run like that for years and keep giving. Customer interviews are a completely different beast, you go from one hour to hundreds of hours ... and its also difficult to outsource it, at least the design of questions and the final analysis, as it requires deep knowledge of your product and the market as a whole to read between the lines properly.
I highly recommend it though, especially for companies in a competitive market and with tricky Product-Market Fit. There is a chance it will flip everything upside down and save the company years of operating costs and time going in a direction it shouldn't have.
If you have some questions about my process with customer interviews or how to get at least proper basic feedback super easily with product surveys - send me connect with message on https://www.linkedin.com/in/jank...Share
Simple Suite
I as a Product Manager it is quite time consuming and complex setting up and conduct the user interviews not to speak of the analysing the notes/recordings then aggregating the findings to extract insights.
I decided to build a SaaS tool to handle all the above (and Prototyping for uxtesting/prioritising aspect) but I need input from other Product Managers about their experience with doing qualitative research.
Would you be open to having a 30+ chat about your experience doing customer/qualitative research.
Simple Suite
Hey Junior, apologies, forgot to respond to this (I work with @viatanas ). More than happy to chat, feel free to book some time via https://calendly.com/morganrhysw... . Book two back to back slots if you can, that way we can both have time to ask a few questions.
We're going to have a focus group of about 20 people over a few Zoom calls to try and get feedback prior to our first release. Not strictly a 1-1 but it should give us some good insight.
We also have the advantage that because our product is a Twitch Extension we'll get to see how it's used LIVE 😀
Also why couldn't you do both?
@viatanas It's a cost benefit right - I mean forms are easy to implement and don't require any people time. So that's the easy route.
I can imagine beyond the time/cost issue people are in some cases afraid of asking users - what if they don't like it, am I confident in talking to them etc...I know I am with our focus groups coming up - which is partly why I'm telling everyone I'm doing them to stop myself from backing out!
Simple Suite
@maxwellcdavis Hey Maxwell, that's great piece of feedback :) I think I was thinking more once there are users, who are already using your product. I think you can absolutely, do both! But I feel for a lot of people short-form feedback replaces long-form interview.
Simple Suite
@maxwellcdavis That's the main thing with interviews, it's actually the time investment. That's what we struggled with in the past.
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