Conducting a customer interview has many benefits – but only if you extract answers you can use to your advantage. To get the right answers however, you need to ask the right questions – and ask them in the right way.
Ultimately, you are looking for honest opinions from your customers. You want to know about their interests and preferences. Ask them about routines, habits and needs to determine how your product can help, or does help them. Look for comparisons between your product and your rivals.
The first part of your survey should therefore be about your customers needs. You want to know whether your product makes their life easier and what benefit they get from it. How would they improve the product?
Gathering information to develop your product
Customer interviews are excellent tools that allow you to collect data that will enable you to effectively improve your product. How you do this may depend on what stage of the production process you are at and may need to write other customer questionnaires dedicated to development of the product.
For the initial stages however, you want to know more about how your customers live their lives. It’s human nature to actually do something which is different to what we tell people we do. Remember that most of the time we are not conscious about our own behaviours, but have an idea of how we should be behaving.
Again the type of question you ask here will depend on your product but a good example to give you an idea is what people say about their eating and exercise habits. Or it may be how often they use their mobile phone, how often do they read, what motivates them? Determine how you can position your product so customers can adapt easily.
Structuring customer interview questions?
It is often the case that questions lead to more questions, so don’t worry about not knowing which questions to ask. After a good brain-storming session you will have more question than you need. You may even decide to throw some away. What you do need to concentrate on at this point is how to structure your questions so that you get honest answers.
To do this, don’t ask questions that are biased towards your product in either a positive or negative way. Let the customer be the judge of that. For example ask, “What do you think of the product?” rather than “What did you like/dislike about the product?” Also draw an opinion from the interviewee rather than leading them into one word answers like “yes” and “no” – unless the product merits it. “Would you vote Conservative again?”
Customer surveys are a great way to get into the hearts and minds of your customers and learn what they really want! With this type of information you can be assured of owning a successful business.
About the Realise Group
The Realise Group specialise in devising structured customer surveys that are designed to enable businesses to gather vital information about their product, brand and services. A team of experienced professionals they deliver quick turnaround times with effective results that help develop effective solution for development and growth.