Customer Interviews: A Step-by-Step Guide to Market Research

When starting a new business, one of the toughest questions is whether your business idea is worth building.

Many entrepreneurs refer to analysts' research and market sizing, to assess their business opportunity. However, most of the published analyses you will find online will not reflect the specifics of your business idea.

This is the reason the teams at Google that are pitching a new idea follow the motto:

Bring your own data

The best way to generate your data is to conduct customer interviews that explore how your future target customers deal with the problem you want to solve today. In this article, we will go through the process of conducting customer research step by step.

Types of Customer Interviews

There are many types of interviews, but all of them more or less fall into one of these categories:

1. Customer Problem Interview

The customer problem interview focuses on exploring a certain job to be done from the perspective of previous experiences of potential customers. Their goal is to:

• understand customer needs and pain points,
• identify potential gaps in existing alternatives,
• the impact that the problem and the lack of a solution have on the customer.

2. Solution Interview

Once you build a prototype or MVP, the solution interview can help assess how well it addresses the customer problems you want to solve. It also gauges the interest and the readiness to pay.

3. Win/Loss Interview

A win/loss interview is typical in B2B businesses and can be conducted after every opportunity is closed, regardless if it was successful or not. It helps with clarifying the buying decision process, the evaluation criteria, and inform your competitive analysis that were considered.

The benefit of the win/loss interview is in streamlining the sales process, strengthening the market positioning, and refining the business strategy from the initial customer problem interviews.

4. Customer Satisfaction Interview

After a customer has used your product for a while, it is a great time to understand more about their experience - what works for them and what does not. The goal is to identify gaps between the initial expectations and needs and what your product or service provides.

As part of these conversations, you will understand more about what drives high satisfaction and what does not, which is a great prioritization criterion for your product development roadmap.

5. Exit Interview

Exit interviews are done when a customer decides to stop using your product. The purpose of this interview is to identify the reasons and find opportunities to expand the lifetime value of your product by addressing more of the needs or for a longer time. Exit interviews can also shed light on what’s next for the customer and how they plan to address their needs in the future.

Breaking down interviews in these buckets covers the whole lifecycle of a customer using your product - from the needs and the problem all the way to deciding not to use it anymore.

Steps to Evaluate Your Business Opportunity with Customer Interviews

Step 1: Preparation

As with many critical activities, the key is in the preparation. To feel comfortable during the interviews and make sure you are getting everything important, you have to prepare a customer interview script.

Each customer interview script needs to be adapted to the objectives and the needs of the research.

For customer problem interviews focus on the previous experience of your potential customer without pitching your own solution. Avoid asking for opinions and hypothetical situations. The more you keep the conversation about past events, the fewer biases and interpretations you will have to analyze.

The Icanpreneur platform helps entrepreneurs and product builders generate customer problem interview scripts that are adapted to the specific job-to-be-done which is the focus of the research. The interview script generation combines the know-how and best industry practices with AI technologies to create a script that feels natural to follow, follows proven research methodologies, and hits all important key points that you need to capture.

Step 2: Source and Schedule Interviews

As part of the preparation, you should also identify the profile of the people you want to talk with. If you already have enough contacts that fall into that profile - great, you can start reaching out to them.

If you don’t have a list of contacts from your customer segment, there are a few options you can consider:

• Think about people from your own network and which of them meet the criteria for your interviews. Starting with family and friends is great as those people will have higher engagement to talk to you.

Don’t worry about your friends wanting to be nice and talk about what you expect to hear - the interview script contains questions that are specifically designed to avoid that defect. For each family member or friend that you interview - ask them about three other contacts they can introduce you to that meet your criteria to quickly expand beyond your own network.

• If you don’t know anyone from your customer segment, identify where those people hang out. Are there meetups, communities, and forums that are active and you can use to find new connections?

Once you have a contact list, it’s time to write down your outreach to those people.

The Icanpreneur platform contains quick snippets that you can use to reach out to people depending on how well you know them and what medium you are reaching out to.

The AI-generated snippets will help you create a message that is relatable, and personal, and motivates the other party to collaborate with you.

Another important part of the email is how you will schedule your meetings. You can use Google Calendar or Calendly, but Icanpreneur has an integrated scheduling feature that will help you keep everything related to your research in one place.

Step 3: Conduct the Interviews

This is probably the most stressful part, especially if you are doing it for the first time. Here are a few tips:

• Dry run: go through the conversation alone. You can just ask questions aloud to check how they sound.
• Practice and learn: pick the contact that you will feel most comfortable with as the first interviewee. Things might go wrong and that’s OK - you will learn a lot from your first session so you want to feel at ease with the person you are interviewing.
• Notetaking: running the conversation and taking notes at the same time can be overwhelming. Ask your interviewee if it is OK to record the conversation so you can get back to it later. This will make sure you have the full conversation captured.

Very often when notetaking, people simply decide to focus on certain things while ignoring others. This can introduce misinterpretations and biases even at that stage which makes further analysis really hard.

• Listen more and talk less: your job is to extract as much as possible from your interviewee by asking open-ended questions. You are not here to pitch your idea or debate. Your questions should mainly direct the conversation in the direction you need and prompt the other person to tell their story job-to-be-done you are exploring.

The Icanpreneur platform handles that part of the interview process by providing a user interface that you can use to capture your conversation. It’s perfectly valid to have a notetaker in the interview who is there just to capture the conversation and remain silent. This will also provide an additional point of view about what the interviewee said and what it means for your product or service.

Step 4: Summarize and Analyze

After 5-10 interviews, you will hopefully start seeing some patterns. In some cases, different people might use the exact same phrases and sentences to describe their pains. This is great, and it means you are on to something!

You can start clustering the interviews into different insights that prove or disprove your initial hypothesis.

Our team is working on a beta feature that allows entrepreneurs and product builders to get a comprehensive analysis of their interviews based on the insights that they want to extract from the interviews. In just a few minutes, you will know:

• How many of your interviewees have the customer problem you are interested in solving
• How are they dealing with it today?
• What is the cost they are bearing for having a suboptimal solution? How important is it for them to find a better one?
• How did they evaluate and choose between different existing alternatives?
• How to ask better questions during your next interviews and what insights are still lacking confirmation? Based on your research goals the platform will suggest what to pay attention to.

If you are interested in trying out this new feature, reach out to our team.

Step 5: Reflect and Adjust

After you have done the heavy lifting it’s time to reflect on your findings and pick your next steps. If you have enough confidence about the size and the importance of your problem - you can move on to the next phase which is solutioning.

If the conversations show the problem is not significant enough or too few people have it - take a step back and adjust your approach based on the latest things you learned.

What You Should Avoid During Conducting Customer Interviews?

• Having no plan: leading interviews based on gut feeling can feel “more relaxed” and inviting to the other party but can significantly reduce the confidence of your findings. Sticking to your plan about who you are interviewing, what you are asking, and how to analyze will make sure you are on track to conduct market research according to industry standards.
• Qualifying Criteria: make sure the people you are scheduling for an interview match the criteria for your interview. Mixing different customer segments or including in the research people outside your target customers may lead to wrong conclusions. Having a detailed Buyer Persona and a Negative Buyer Persona can be very helpful in avoiding this pitfall.
• Interrupting: every time you interrupt the interviewee, you are altering their train of thought, potentially drifting away from what’s top of mind for them.
• Asking leading questions: the way you ask your question can significantly influence the answer you will get. The interview takes care to avoid misleading questions.

Another benefit of sticking to your script is that you will be able to compare different interviews better, as you have covered the same topics.

• Recording without permission: asking for permission for recording might be boring but in many cases is a legal requirement and can destroy your trust with respondents.
• Ignoring non-verbal cues: words are just 7% of the communication, while non-verbal messages are 55% of the communication stream. If you find your interviewee emotional about a certain part of the conversation, dig deeper (if appropriate) to understand those triggers and what they mean to you.

Up to now, not every business could afford to hire a product or market analyst or purchase a research to a consultancy agency.

Thanks to Icanpreneur, this is no longer needed and you can do your own market research backed conversations with your target audience.

This is a great foundation for taking your business idea to the next level:

• Get funding,
• Find first customers and start selling,
• Onboard new team members or partners.