Icanpreneur's Latest Update Turns Customer Conversations into Actionable Insights

Every entrepreneur or product leader that decide to conduct a customer research know this feeling - after days of conversations with people, you have a pile of transcripts on your laptop, a bunch of sticky notes on the desk, and that feeling that you got 1-2 "great" conversations but you are not sure what was great about them and what happend with all the other conversations. Customer interviews for a long time were victims of subjective interpretations, cognitive limitations, and fragmented undocumented conversations. Most founders and product managers don't even bother trying. The latest update of the Icanpreneur platform reinvents the process of analyzing customer interviews at scale and helps entrepreneurs to transform customer conversations into customer insights for problem validation, go-to-market strategies, and fundraising.

Problems

Customer interviews are on of the most powerful technique for getting quick feedback about your business idea from the market. But many founders deprioritize customer interviews due to problem when trying to conduct them.

Documenting the Conversations

Many customer conversations remain behind closed doors and cannot be “replayed”. The reasons might be different from forgetting to hit threcord button to reluctance to ask for permission.

However, the results is that such conversations cannot be reliably included in the customer research analysis and the only trace they leave is the subjective in the participants about how it went with maybe a few arguable quotes.

If not documented properly customer conversations cannot be used later on in a consecutive product study. Many times when you pivot or reiterate over your idea, old conversations could be a valid source of information unless they are lost for good.

Conducting Comparable Interviews

A slight change in the way or the order we ask questions during a customer interview can significantly change the responses given by the interviewees. Consider the following example:

You are interviewing travelers to understand their behavior when booking a hotel. You ask virtually the same question in slightly different options.

Option A: "What features do you look for when choosing a hotel?"

Option B: "Which amenities are most important to you when booking a hotel room?"

The answers to the first questions will look like:

• "Location and price are key."
• "I look for good reviews and cleanliness."
• "Free Wi-Fi is essential."

For Option B, you will likely get:

• "A gym and pool are must-haves."
• "I prefer hotels with a restaurant on site."
• "A comfortable bed and quiet room are important."

Such minor changes in the posed questions, focus the interviewees' attention on completely different categories. This will prevent you from aggregating insights from multiple interviews and will not provide clarity for the product’s direction.

Extracting Insights from the Whole Dataset

Humans’ brain can effectively work with seven items at a time (+/- 2). When working with 15-20 interviews or more, it’s really hard to process them and draw objective conclusions manually. Instead, the brain will take one of the many shortcuts it uses daily in life:

• Focus on conversations that focus on what matches the initial expectations
• Focus on interviews that invoked an emotional reaction
• Prefer interviewees who you can relate to more

By taking those shortcuts, you are most likely skip important insights or overestimate or underestimate the importance or impact of given behaviors.

Supporting Hypothesis with Quotes

Building confidence in your product hypothesis with customer interviews is great. However, you need to be able to pass on this confidence to others like investors, team members, partners, and customers who haven’t been part of the conversation.

Using customer quotes from interviews is a powerful way to provide credibility to your vision. It’s always more convincing when other people provide evidence to your point of view on your behalf.

In addition, quotes can add important nuance and color to your story. These details provide even more credibility and help others relate and empathize with the customer segment.

The Icanpreneur Way

To address these pain points, the Icanprenuer platform provides a complete environment for planning, conducting, and analyzing customer interviews. The latest update of the platform unlocks analysis over multiple interviews with aggregation of insights and quality analysis of the interview process.

Insights

The aggregation of insights over multiple interviews combines the best of both worlds - customer interviews and customer surveys.

The automatic analysis of the interviews provides the depth of the insights that customer interviews bring with the quantifiable validation from surveys.

For each insight you will get information in how many interview it came up and if you are interested to deep dive further - you can go to the specific interviews and check out quotes that support the insight. The increases the credibility of your hypothesis and provides color and details to each insight.

The most important advantage of the automatic analysis is its objectivity. IVA is not subjected to personal preferences, biases, convictions, and limiting beliefs for what’s possible and what not. The extracted information is only based on what was told during the conversation.

Last but not least, the platform saves time - a lot of time. Just imagine the amount of work to go through 10-20 conversations, extract insights from each of them, highlight quotes, and group similar insights over all conversations.

Now, imagine doing this for 100 interviews - the platform gets it done in a minute.

Quality

The quality of the customer interviews is one of the most important factors for insightful customer research. Tiny details in the wording of the questions can significantly impact the responses of the interviewee.

The Icanpreneur platform can catch even the smallest detail and provide actionable feedback with examples and explanation for how to improve your customer interview next time.

A Living Document vs a Static Analysis

The customer interview analysis in Icanpreneur is a fluid process in which every new interview that you add, augments your understanding and provides more details and color. Just imagine a buyer persona that becomes more vivid and realistic every day with every new interview that comes in.

This is a significant shift over the static analysis that quickly become outdated and unusable. Your buyer personas and win/loss analysis change and evolve every day just like your customers do and as your product should do.

Wrap Up

By using Icanpreneur to analyze your interviews, you will get more insights with evidence about their credibility at the fraction of your time needed for a detailed analysis.