Common Customer Interview Techniques

Getting feedback from customers should be easy. Just call them up and ask them what they want in your product. Right? Um… no. Customer interviews are a helpful way to get feedback about your product, but you need to make sure you ask the right questions in the right way. Here’s a collection of guides to make sure the time you spend talking to your customers provides some useful results and not just a wish list you have no plan to deliver.

How to conduct a great customer interview. Customer interviews are a great opportunity to dig deeper into how people interact with your product and your brand. An effective customer interview can reveal customer frustrations, help you with product development, and tell you a lot about the customer experience and how you can improve it. If you want to know how to conduct a customer interview, the folks at Vowel put this guide together for you.
(via Vowel) 

Lead better customer interviews with this downloadable guide.  Customer interviews are an opportunity to put a prototype in front of real people to learn what is and isn’t working so you can adjust accordingly. This step helps make sure your team is building the right thing. In order for it to work, you need to get the right information from your interviewees, and that means asking the right questions. Jackie Colburn put together a customer interview guide and shared some general guidelines that give you context for the guide and help you understand how to craft questions that will get the right information flowing.
(via: Jackie Colburn)

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Back to school

It’s that time of year again in my household. The sound of new alarms going off throughout our house… anxieties and excitement both on overdrive… and screams of “Where’s my backpack?!” reverberating in the morning just like clockwork. Yep, my kids are headed back to school… and for them, it’s the time of year that they get a fresh start.

But maybe it’s time that we all looked at this time of year as an opportunity for ourselves to have a bit of a fresh start. Is there a project you’re working on that’s turned a bit stale? Are you needing a reason to feel a bit of a recharge on a product you’ve launched a while back, but now needs attention? Maybe you can inject that “back to school” newness into your own work. (I mean, you can at least pretend, right?)

When it comes down to it, the first day back is rarely about diving into the deep end. It's more about setting the tone, understanding expectations, and setting goals. As Product Managers, why not use this season to reevaluate? It may not be a completely new start for us, but there’s no reason we can’t treat this time of year in a similar way. Maybe that feature you’ve been pushing can be approached differently. Or perhaps, like that overambitious list of extracurriculars one might make at the start of the school year, it’s time to prioritize and perhaps shelve a few things.

In essence, 'Back to School' isn't just for the kids. It's an ethos, a golden ticket to a reset button. So strap on your metaphorical backpacks, maybe toss in a pencil (#2, of course) for good measure, and let’s head “back to school” with that renewed fervor we may need. 

Here's to fresh starts and A+ projects! 🍎📓🖊️

Customer interviews: How to recruit, what to ask, and how to synthesize what you learn. Customer interviewing is one of the most valuable activities a product team can do. It’s simply the easiest, most sustainable way of learning about your customers and what they need. This knowledge gives teams a competitive advantage that compounds over time. Whether you are brand new to conducting customer interviews or have conducted hundreds of customer interviews, this guide from Teresa Torres covers everything you need to know.
(via: Teresa Torres)

13 Open-ended customer interview questions for product managers. There are plenty of different feedback channels you can use to capture the evolving voice of your customer, but customer interviews are ideal for gathering in-depth, granular insights. Giving users this space to share their perspectives means you can get to the heart of customer behaviors, challenges, and opportunities—all key customer data points that can help you deliver a better product and overall customer experience. The team at UserVoice shared these 13 open-ended customer interview questions you can use as a starting point for your conversations.
(via: UserVoice)  

How to do customer discovery calls like a pro: 5 tips you should know. Whether you are starting a new business or growing an existing one, talking to customers is essential for success. But just talking to them won't be enough. Leo Wendler gives you five important tips that will help you interview your customers like a pro.
(via jamie )

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