Research method
Customer Interviews
Usually 30 minute - 1 hour sessions run on a one-to-one basis either in person or remotely on Zoom, Teams, etc. Customers are recruited via email database and should ideally be incentivized for their time, e.g. a discount code or gift card.
When to reach for it
To understand customers motivations, FUDs (fears, uncertainties, and doubts) perception of your product/service, to understand what problem/s your product/service solves for them and any improvement areas based on their experiences.
Customer interviews can also be used to investigate specific topics or areas of opportunity.
Strengths and limits
Pros
Customer interviews allow you to dig deeper than customer surveys by asking follow up questions based on customers answers. This makes them more appropriate for more complex use cases or when you have a more specific area of focus.
Cons
Customer interviews can be time-consuming, which means they are not effective for gathering large samples of data (unless you have a large budget / a lot of time resources). To help mitigate this, customer interviews can be used alongside a customer survey to gather both in-depth, high quality insights at a large scale.
An insightful customer interview is determined by the questions you ask. Much like running moderated usability studies, there is skill involved in
running an effective customer interview. You need to avoid leading questions, and also ensure questions are not multifaceted as this can cause difficulty in analysis.
Customer interviews should not be used to gather feedback into website user experiences. Asking users to recall their experiences of your website is likely to gather invalid data. If you're looking for UX insights, a moderated usability study would be more appropriate (note: these methods can also be combined into a hybrid interview with some usability study tasks).
Gathering data from existing (or lapsed) customers will always have an element of bias, since these people have pre-conceptions of your brand / product / service based on their experiences. This is okay as long as you are aware of this and mitigate it accordingly, e.g. by also running research with people who have never heard of or used your brand / product / service before. For more focused research, in some cases using existing customers will be more relevant, whereas in others, using new users will be more appropriate.
Practical considerations
Recruitment
The most effective recruitment method for existing customers is to reach out to your existing email database of customers. You should consider the types of customers you want to speak to when deciding who to email, e.g. recent convertors, loyal customers, lapsed customers, etc. Who you speak to will influence the output, so this should be based around your research goal. If you're running top-level exploratory research, then start with recent convertors, however if you are running interviews with a more focused objective, use this to determine who you reach out to.
Incentive
An incentive can be used to help boost the response rate. This could be in the form of a discount code or gift card. The amount and type of incentive should be determined by the type of people you are trying to reach, e.g. B2B vs. B2C, age, household income, job title / position, etc. Also consider what you are asking of them, e.g. 30 minutes or 1 hour, the incentive should be reflective of the time they are giving you.
Logistics
If you're recruiting customers for interviews and planning the sessions yourself, there are a few logistics to keep in mind;
- Booking a timeslot; before you send the initial email asking for people to take part, consider how you'll organise the sessions. You could share a Calendly link or something similar to allow customers to book directly with you. Whatever you use, you want to avoid having to manually agree on a date / time by going back and forth via email.
- Tool; if you're not including any usability study tasks in your interview then you can effectively use any video conferencing tool (Zoom, Teams, Hangouts, etc). Don't forget to record the sessions (but ask permission first) to ensure you don't have to write everything down when you're running the interview.
- No shows; especially when recruiting yourself, there's a relatively high chance of no-shows. Consider how to mitigate this, for example, sending out a series of reminders in the days / hours running up to the session, as well as over recruiting (e.g. running 1-2 more sessions than you need). Mention in your comms that you will wait for 10 minutes before assuming a no-show, so you don't have to sit and wait for the full amount of time until they turn up.
Common tools
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