The Toughest Customer Interviews: Decoding the Silent Customer

When talking to potential customers, some groups are easier than others to extract insights from:

• Friends and family are eager to talk to you but can give you false positive or false negative signs if you are not following a structured approach to interviewing
• High-profile executives are hard to get to and might not give you enough time to get into the details of their customer problems.
• Teenagers can often be skeptical or uninterested in participating in customer interviews and give short or vague answers.

But one of the toughest crowds to conduct customer interviews with is … pets. Can you even interview a customer who cannot talk? While the task might seem daunting, some companies produce pet products that their customers love. How do they do that?

The Pet Whisperers

Pet’s language is their behavior, and there is a lot they can tell you if you observe carefully:

• Are they anticipating the treat you are about to give them?
• Do they eat with enthusiasm or are they hesitant to try?
• Tail wagging, eating speed, and sniffing are all strong indicators of your pet's preferences.

It’s important to note the species-specific behavioral characteristics. Cats show love and contentment by kneading around food, while dogs, on the other hand, might circle excitedly around their meal.

Interviewing pets has one unexpected advantage - they can’t and won’t lie to you. Unlike people, your dog won’t eat the food, so you don’t feel offended.

Whether your interviewee is an animal or a human, body language rarely lies. That’s why, during interviews, it’s important to keep an eye on non-verbal signals that can give useful hints about the sentiment and emotions the person in front of you has on a certain topic.

Techniques for Customer Research with Pets

Similar to how we conduct A/B tests with website visitors, pets are presented with options and left to choose between them.

Another way to gauge the likelihood of a given product is to measure the amount of effort the animal is willing to put into getting to it. Such motivational tasks can differentiate real delighters from products the pet considers a commodity.

An important aspect of customer research with animals is studying their behavior in their natural environment—their home. The owners perform some tests, which are recorded for the product team to study.

A similar principle applies when interviewing humans. Asking and observing your interviewee imminently alters their behavior to some extent. With each question or note you throw into the conversation, you are steering it in the direction you need, not necessarily the one the interviewee wants to discuss. So, being mindful about interrupting and leading the conversation can limit the noise your presence adds to it.

Buyer Persona vs User Petsona

Exciting the pet itself is not enough to create a successful pet product. Pet products have at least two target personas. The pet is the user persona, but the pet owner is the buyer persona.

So, a product needs to appeal to the dog or the cat and its owner. The owner has different jobs to be done than the pet:

• They want their hairy friend to be healthy
• They don’t want their house to smell like a fish market. Mind how different are the requirements for smell between the two personas
• They want to administer the food without making a huge mess every time.

This is similar to the B2B products where multiple personas are involved in buying decisions, and often, those personas have different needs and interests.

The Fresh Example

In the end, you need to address the customer needs of both the pets and their owners into a single product. Freshpet is a company that revolutionized the pet food market by offering refrigerated pet food in regular human supermarkets.

Initially, it met a lot of pushback from the supermarkets and delivery companies as the delivery method was completely different from everything else related to pet food. It needed refrigerated trucks, fridges in the shops that are separate from human ones, and a much quicker turnaround time for the inventory.

However, demand was strong, and consumer feedback was positive, so Freshpet established a new supply chain and created a new market. This is an excellent example of the blue ocean strategy, which helps Freshpet win over the competition by defining a new, uncontested market in which it is a leader.

All of that stemmed from understanding and studying the customer needs of the customer segment that can’t even talk with them. Freshpet does not just create delicious and healthy food for pets. They went as far as to design packaging and texture of the food that is pleasant for the pet owner to work with while preparing their pets' meals.

None of this happened overnight. Freshpet rigorously experimented with ingredients, recipes, textures, packaging, and more to find the right combination that satisfied all the criteria.

If you want to learn more about Freshpet’s story, listen to their founder, Scott Morris, at How I Built This.

Did you know?

We are used to thinking of Mars as one of the biggest candy businesses on the planet. However, the company's biggest business is pet food and pet care, which accounts for tens of billions of dollars annually.

As odd as this may sound at first, it seems that a company with the product development processes to understand the needs of pets has no problem figuring out what humans need as well.

Wrap Up

Whether designing for pets or humans, the moral of the story is that great products come from a deep understanding of the target audience and their needs through observation, empathy, and relentless curiosity. Customers can articulate their problems very well but are not great at identifying the best solution for them. This is where innovative companies can stand out and shine.