What questions do you ask during customer interviews?
Alexey Shashkov
31 replies
Hey, product makers! 🙌🙂
What questions do you ask your customers/prospective customers during customer interviews?
Replies
Carsten Pleiser@ckpleiser
Mind Body Tab
- Tell me about your old solution?
- How long have you been doing things that way?
- Tell me more about that:
- What did you like and didn't you like?
- So when do you have the first thought you may need something new?
- After that first thought, then what happened?
- How did you go about to finding a new solution?
- Did you immediately go out to find new solutions?
- Who did you ask?
Share
FromNotion
@ckpleiser Howdy, Carsten! I’ve written your question down. Thanks a lot, man!
What’s the most challenging part about customer interviews for you?
Mind Body Tab
@shashcoffe Mate, actually there is something that sucks. Pulling together list of ICPs to contact based on criteria like:
1. Drove the buying decision, not a champion (who felt the pain and championed the switch from the old solution to the new)
2. Are highly engaged
3. Most financially viable with highest ACV and highest paying plan
4. They "get it" and the problem it solves and how it works, no burden on support
5. Converted long enough ago but not too long ago (3-9 months ago is recommended)
At the moment, I do this all manually looking at Stripe, Intercom data & Pipedrive.
FromNotion
@ckpleiser Oh my! The manual work looks very difficult!
Carsten, how much time did you spend on that manual works in Dec? Have you tried to search for a better way to do that?
@ckpleiser thanks for sharing :)
Mind Body Tab
@shashcoffe You already asked me this ;) No challenges.
The questions that have always helped me gain more info were :
- do you see the situation as a concern?
- what workarounds did you employ to bypass/overcome the situation or problem in hand?
- what have you done to solve the issue?
The subsequent questions are off shoots from the response to the above.
FromNotion
Notesally 2.0
Things that I try to learn from the customer interviews (in the context of whether my product is useful to them or not):
1. Do they have the problem X? Is solving that their focus?
2. When was the last time they had this problem?
3. What have they tried to solve this problem? (If they have not tried in some way or other, may be it is not that urgent to begin with)
I got these questions from Jen Abel of JJellyfish from one of her conference talks.
Shameless Plug:
Also, I wrote about 5 questions that I removed from my conversations - https://notesally.com/blog/remov...
FromNotion
@vivek_ganesan Hello, Vivek. I really apprecite your reply. Thanks for sharing your questions and your article. That’s really helpful!
How many customer interviews do you conduct per month? Haw many ones have you already had in December?
I absolutely love the resources on survey design and UX research from Maze.
If you haven't checked out the question bank (https://www.producthunt.com/post...)
that @ash_oliverrr created, do it! :)
FromNotion
@ash_oliverrr @tanyasharma That’s awesome, Tanya! I owe you one!
Do you conduct UX-tests with your users on Zoom calls?
@shashcoffe - Yes, via zoom calls. We've used Maze as well for usability testing and getting async feedback.
FromNotion
@tanyasharma Tanya, that’s awesome! Thanks for sharing your experience!
Can we have a Zoom conversation to chat a little about that?
Thanks for the share and shoutout @tanyasharma!! 💙 love the discussion as well, have heard from lots of teams running Maze + Zoom combination tests 🤘
What happened the day you finally decided you needed to solve this specific pain?
How did you research solutions?
What solutions did you consider?
Now that you have a solution, what's the one thing you can do now that you couldn't before?
What made you confident that you found/chose the right solution?
Who influences you the most in your industry?
Where do you spend most of your time online?
What the one thing you hate about your industry?
Anything else you would like to tell me?
Always ask them to elaborate or ask a deeper question after they answer. Surface level answers won't get you what you need.
FromNotion
@dawn_veltri1 Hey, Dawn! I owe you one! I’ve written your questions down.
How many customer interviews are you conducting? How many interviews have you already made in Dec?
@dawn_veltri1 Dawn, thanks for sharing.
Brief on Demand by Amy
- What is your role?
- Tell me a bit about your company.
- What tools are part of your tech stack nowadays?
- What are your main challenges (when it comes to X)?
- How are you currently solving problem Y?
FromNotion
@lior_galante_cohen Hi, Lior! You’re the best commenter! I owe you one!
Good questions! How many of these interviews do you do a month? How many have you done in December?
AuditEZ : Facebook Ad Reporting & Audits
Hello!
There's a good book on this subject with great examples, on how to speak to your customers.
It's "Mom Test" from Rob Fitzpatrick.
@quentin_schueller I don’t like the title of the book “The Mom Test” - which kept me from reading it for a long time - but I think it is hands down the best book for learning about customer interviews. Talking to Humans is a really short book that I also found useful.
FromNotion
@quentin_schueller Hi, Quentin! Yeah, that’s a great book. I've read it twice.
What are your favorite questions to ask during customer interviews?
FromNotion
FromNotion
I ask a mixture of open-ended and close-ended questions during customer interviews. I usually ask these major questions.
- What do you think of this product?
- Are you satisfied with this product?
- If not satisfied, what are the reasons?
- Would you please name some alternative products?
- What product were you using before this product?
- How can we improve this product?
- How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?
- What other solutions have you considered?
- Please rank this product from 1 to 10
FromNotion
@elena_cirera Hi, Elena! Thank you for sharing your list of top questions. I appreciate that!
How many customer interviews do you conduct? How many ones have you already had in December?