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Best practices for planning, conducting, and analyzing customer interviews—with tips on questions, templates, and mistakes to avoid.
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Stakeholders love numbers; quantitative data is straightforward and easy to understand.
But qualitative research is just as valuable. Talking to your customers to dig into their intrinsic motivations and the ‘why?’ behind their actions or thoughts provides a deeper layer of understanding your customers.
If you don’t talk to your customers, they’ll talk about you—often, in the form of negative reviews, low NPS scores, and poor sales. Conducting customer interviews is a great way to add a more human, detailed perspective to your hard, quantitative data.
Whether you’re a full-time UX researcher tasked with creating user personas, an entrepreneur with a brilliant idea trying to break into a new market, a product designer looking to prioritize the next feature release, or a marketer deliberating over the theme for your next webinar, the insights you learn from interviewing customers can help you make important decisions that sustain—and grow—your success.
Use the qualitative insights from customer interviews to validate qualitative data, and vice versa. Rather than relying on a single research method, focus on triangulating your research with a balance between both quantitative and qualitative data from various methods to fully understand your customers.
In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about customer interviews, including:
Customer interviews are, as the name suggests, interviews you conduct with your customers. They don’t have to be formal, or scary, or even very long. At their simplest, customer interviews are an opportunity for you to get a glimpse into how your customers interact with your product and brand every day.
Sometimes, but not always. User interviews may include interviews with folks who aren’t current customers, such as prospects from a new market or competitors’ customers.
The semantic nuance here isn’t terribly important (people often use them interchangeably), although you may have a bit more trouble recruiting and managing participants for customer interviews than you would for general interviews with non-customers. Luckily, purpose-built panel management tools like Research Hub can help you navigate these challenging waters (more on this later).
Let’s dig into what customer interviews can do for your business, and how you can make the most of them.
As Steli Efti, CEO of Close.com, succinctly said:
“Whoever understands the customer best wins.”
That’s why we need customer interviews—to understand the customer better than our competitors do. To know and feel the customer’s pain points. To see how our product impacts (or has the potential to impact) a customer’s life. That deep, nuanced customer empathy is how you create products customers are excited to use, keep using, and tell their friends about.
Customer interviews are the catalyst for smart business decisions. You can use them to solve a specific usability problem, get a better idea of who your customer base is, or gauge interest in a new product.
Though it may seem like a lot to get started with customer interviews, once you’ve got a formula for doing them efficiently and effectively, you can use it again and again. This kind of habitual or continuous customer interview process is key if you want to iterate rapidly and stay ahead of the competition.
To demonstrate the purpose and importance of customer interviews, let’s walk through three examples of why people do customer interviews:
… and how customer interviews can have an impact on each.
Finding product-market fit (a process also referred to as customer development by The Lean Startup) can be tricky, but it’s incredibly important if you want to build a successful product. Often, this process involves putting the fundamental assumptions you have about your customers to the test and validating (or debunking) your ideas through research.
Now, some of you might be thinking: I’ve barely got my foot into the prototyping stage of product development. I don’t even have a product, let alone paying customers to talk to. Wouldn’t customer interviews be a waste of time?
Absolutely not—interviewing customers (or potential customers) is no less important for early-stage startups as it is for mid-level and enterprise companies. You’ll save money in the long run by validating your ideas from the start, instead of building something no one wants.
We know this because User Interviews was built out of the ashes of bad product/market fit. If you haven’t read our founding story yet, I highly recommend you check it out in full.
This is one of the most common reasons people do customer interviews.
Interviews like these can happen in the discovery phase—before you’ve developed the feature or implemented the new design—as well as the testing phase and post-release phases. When you do these interviews depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
For example, Intuit, the company behind products like TurboTax and Quickbooks, has a rigorous process of customer development research. They regularly conduct “follow-me-home” interviews with customers. The point of these interviews is to observe customers in their own environments—a method akin to ethnographic research—to give Intuit employees a better understanding of their day-to-day lives.
During these interviews, the Intuit team realized a lot of their customers were freelancers, or a part of the gig economy. These insights played a big part in creating Quickbooks Self-Employed. What Intuit does well is that they don’t just conduct customer interviews once and run with those one-time insights for every new feature development. Instead, Intuit regularly conducts customer interviews to keep a continuous pulse check on their customers. This helps them stay on the right track every step of the way.
At the end of the day, your customers are people—dynamic, complicated, and sometimes unpredictable people. Their needs, desires, and relationship to your product are almost guaranteed to change over time. By conducting continuous customer research, you can keep track of these changes and adapt your business accordingly to maintain long-term customer engagement.
Continuous customer research can take the form of office hours (where you block off time on your schedule every few weeks to chat with customers about their experiences) or more formal studies. Either way, customer interviews provide open, flexible, and regular opportunities to connect with your customers and learn more about what’s delighting or frustrating them.
Customer interviews can be as simple as talking to a few customers, or as complex as larger scale research studies. Regardless, creating a repeatable system for customer interviews sets the groundwork to learn about your customers continuously and efficiently.
Here’s the process of conducting customer interviews broken down step-by-step:
Phase 1: The prep work
Phase 2: The interview
Phase 3: The insights
Let's get into each phase and break down each step with best practices and tips for streamlining.
In this section, we’ll provide you with tips for planning customer interviews specifically—but if you’d like more information about planning for UX research more generally, check out the UX Research Field Guide Chapter, Planning For UX Research.
To make sure the time you spend conducting interviews is worth it, set a specific goal.
Your goal could be as general as “I want to know more about how my customers view my product” or as specific as “I want to know how my customers feel about billing for large projects when paying in foreign currencies.”
The important thing is setting a clear intention. Know why you’re talking to these people in the first place. Everything else can build off of that idea.
It’s also important to set a success metric for your interviews at this stage. Keep your success metric simple, so it’s easy to know whether or not you’ve hit it.
For example, if you’re trying to confirm that a problem is worth solving (or rather, that its solution is worth prioritizing), you could say set a metric around the percentage of users who mention this problem unprompted in their interviews.
Every customer interview involves three groups of people:
If it’s possible for stakeholders to participate in customer interviews, great! But usually, stakeholders won’t have the time to join in on every interview—and with an effective moderator, it won’t be necessary. Either way, stakeholders should be involved in other aspects of the research process, including goal setting and making insight-based decisions after the fact.
For the session itself, you may want to loop in a note-taker; having a note-taker allows the moderator to focus on the interviewee, and to pay attention to nuances and non-verbal cues that might be missed when glancing back and forth at a note-taking template. Of course, you can conduct customer interviews without a note-taker, so long as you record your sessions and review the recording after. However, we recommend you use a smart note-taking tool during interviews to make sure you’re capturing all the right details. Keep reading to find our list of the best note-taking tools for user research later in the tools section.
A customer interview guide should include a rough outline of questions you want to ask and topics you want to cover, in the order you want to cover them. Writing the guide can seem like a daunting task, but we’re here to help.
This spreadsheet, including sample customer interview questions, a moderator guide, and a note-taker template, is part of our free interview Launch Kit:
📚Want more templates? Explore our free Template Library to browse through different templates for UX research, made by User Interviews for other UX researchers.
Depending on your customer interview questions, your participants’ responses can vary in level of detail, length, thoughtfulness, relevance, and so on. In other words, the quality of your customer interview questions can impact the quality of your insights.
If your customer interview questions are pushing participants to respond in a certain way, you won’t get true, objective answers to your research study. Instead, try to craft questions that encourage customers to tell stories with details of their thoughts and actions.
👇Here’s a list of tips to keep in mind when writing customer interview questions.
🟢 Customer interview question DOs
🔴 Customer interview question DON’Ts
In order to get the most out of your interviews, you need your customers to be as specific as possible. The more details they can give you, the easier it is to build an action plan based on what you learned.
📝 Note: Interview questions are not the same as your core user research questions. For more information about the difference between these two types of questions (and how they align with each other), check out the User Research Questions Chapter of the UX Research Field Guide.
The ‘sweet spot’ for your sample size will differ depending on your goals and the type of study you’re running, so do some thinking and research before you start recruiting customers.
Consider the specific needs and goals you mapped out for your customer interviews, and decide on your sample size from there. You can learn more about sample sizing in our UX Research Field Guide chapter: How to Recruit Participants for Research Studies.
Now here comes the hard part: recruiting your target participants. Finding the right customers to talk to can be a huge challenge and timesuck. There’s also scheduling, interview invites, incentives, and so much more to consider.
Feeling overwhelmed with research recruitment? Here are some ways you can streamline recruitment for your customer interviews:
When determining who you want to interview, you might be inclined to recruit from your own customers who already use or have experience with your product. But if you’re having trouble recruiting from your own customers, you can also consider talking to prospective customers who don’t have experience with your product yet for a fresh, new perspective. Matthew Morrison of Braze, said this about his experience recruiting B2B customer look-alikes with User Interviews:
“The turnaround time was like less than 24 hours and we were able to set up research sessions with everyone that fit our criteria within a week. And we got some really valuable feedback that we wouldn't have gotten had we just relied on our customers alone…Because I think you get a lot of internal bias always just talking to your customers.”
🧾Want to standardize the process of research recruiting? Get your copy of our quick-start recruiting template to train your team with recruiting best practices.
The actual interview is the most important—and difficult—phase to conduct, so you’ll want to approach this carefully. One thing you need to keep in mind at all points of the interview (before, during, and after) is: Remember to check your bias.
While bias in research is unavoidable, it's essential to be aware of and aim to reduce your own biases when conducting and analyzing customer interviews. Above all,
“Never go into user research to prove a point, and never create goals that seek to justify a position or reinforce a perspective.”
—Mike Kuniavsky, Technology R&D Senior Principal at Accenture Labs in Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research
With that in mind, here are some best practices for interviewing customers:
Before you start talking to customers, be sure to double-check:
To ensure the customer remembers to show up, send them a reminder email the morning of the session. You can do this manually the day of, or you can schedule it to send automatically during the prep phase.
For example, User Interviews’s Research Hub allows you to set up bulk messaging and automated outreach to help you reduce no-shows. Hub will also automatically generate and send a unique Zoom link to confirmed participants, so you can be sure they’ve received the link before the session begins.
As you prepare for the interview session, decide on the research incentive for your participants. Keep in mind that incentives don’t have to be cash-based. Try and tailor the incentives for the specific group of participants by thinking about what uniquely motivates or benefits them.
For example, if you talk to small business owners, offering a product discount can be a compelling offer if they can benefit from using your product. If you’re talking to free trial users, you could extend their trial or give them exclusive access to certain features that otherwise wouldn’t be available on their free plan. Get creative and put some thought into your incentives as you prepare for the customer interview.
Terry Gross, acclaimed journalist, starts conversations with “tell me about yourself.” You should start there too.
Building a bit of rapport with your customer in the beginning helps you see their interaction with your product as a part of their bigger picture. It also just sets people at ease.
Open-ended conversation starters like “tell me about yourself” allows customers to describe more than just their job title, what they do on the weekends, or how they use your product.
Before you dig into the bigger questions, go over the framework for the interview. Remind the customer how long the interview will last, and let them know that you want their honest feedback.
Now it’s time to get into why we’re all here, to help you achieve the goal you set for your customer interviews. At this point, you can start relying on your script a little bit more to make sure you get to the most important questions on your list.
Remember, you want to get your customer to tell you their stories. Stories are personal, real, and specific—and they help you uncover the specifics behind why your customers do what they do (something product analytics alone just can’t tell you).
There are tons of tips on how to get your customers to tell these specific stories, from expert interviewers like Michael Margolis of Google Ventures and Erika Hall of Mule Design.
✨There are a few things that all of these lists advise, but the main goal is to turn the customer interview into a productive, thought-provoking conversation. If you’re not clearly understanding a customer’s answer to a question, dig deeper.
You can always follow up your question with a “why” or a “tell me about...” Many interviewers use a framework called the 5 whys to uncover deeper meanings.
Here’s an example from The Interaction Design Foundation:
“Not as many customers are subscribing to the website’s newsletter after the design changed.”
If you’re talking more than your customer, that’s a problem.
Be an active listener; create space for customers to share their experiences. Digging in and probing the research participant is an important skill, but so is active listening to engage with the participant in a way that makes them feel heard.
As Babz Jewell of Variant said,
“Radical listening is hearing what people have to say, even if it's outside of this script or discussion guide or product testing. So much rich data can come from the sort of offhand comments or conversations and you can be proven wrong over and over again.”
Be an active, radical listener, even if it’s tempting to cut in and help customers if they’re struggling to describe something, or correct them about an aspect of your product or business. Don’t do it. Use this time to listen to your customer and ask open-ended questions that encourage them to keep talking.
Here’s how Hiten Shah, founder of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics, describes this strategy:
“When you want to do interviews and get emotion and stories out of your customers or potential customers, it’s very important to actually be quiet. If you ask a question, you should shut up and wait until they answer it. If they don’t answer it in the amount of time that you want to talk, ask the question in a different way; but don’t lead the witness. Don’t give them a specific answer. Don’t try to talk too much around telling them what to say or anything like that.”
When you take time to simply listen and observe, you might also start to notice non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language, all of which can further communicate a customer's emotions. Pay attention to these cues, and include them in your notes.
When you’re satisfied with the answers you’ve gathered, or you’re running out of time, give the customer a chance to ask you questions. This allows them to get anything they’ve been thinking about off their chest. It also opens the door to questions or problems you didn’t even think about asking (which can be good fodder for future research!).
Thank your customer for their time. Let them know you appreciate their feedback and time, and give them whatever incentive you offered.
Block off 10-15 minutes between each interview. This not only gives you some buffer time if your customer is late or the interview goes over time, but it also gives you an opportunity to breathe and reflect between sessions.
Experienced interviewers know that when you’re conducting lots of interviews, the sessions can end up blending together a bit. Taking a few minutes after the session to jot down your biggest takeaways from that interview specifically can help make synthesizing your thoughts easier at the end of the day.
Don’t know what to write after an interview? That’s ok, we’ve got you covered. Just fill out this form from our interview Launch Kit after your interviews.
You’re not chatting with customers to fill the time. You’re conducting research—and research is meant to help you create actionable steps to progress towards your goals, whether it be for research goals or bottomline business goals.
As Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist, said:
“No research without action, no action without research.”
But drawing conclusions and actionable insights from your customer interviews can be a long and cognitive-heavy process, especially when analyzing loads of qualitative data.
Here are a few tips for analyzing and synthesizing the shiny new insights you pulled from customer interviews—efficiently and methodically.
You don’t have to wait until the end of your customer interviews to start analyzing your insights. In fact, waiting to make sense of your insights at the end might leave you feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information you need to go through.
Take note of in-the-moment ideas, anomalies, and interesting details with periodic analysis during your customer interviews. By the time you sit down to really dig into the data, you can refer back to your notes as a great starting point rather than staring blankly at the dataset.
Qualitative data analysis can be time-consuming; it requires tasks like manual tagging, qualitative coding, transcription analysis, and more. Speed up the process with the help of tools that streamline some of these tasks.
A few ways you can accelerate qualitative analysis from your customer interviews include:
📘 Need help with qualitative coding? We explain each step in the qualitative coding process to help you make sense of complex data.
In our Field Guide chapter: Analysis in UX Research, we describe qualitative data reduction as:
“the process of transforming raw data into a simplified, ordered, and categorized format.”
In other words, it’s the process by which we erase the background noise of irrelevant data and organize the most important bits of data from customer interviews into a summarized and actionable format.
If you don’t want to drown in a sea of raw data, use a systematic approach to help you identify and prioritize patterns, themes, and stories in relation to your unique research goals.
📕 Read more about different systematic approaches for qualitative data reduction in our Field Guide.
Relying on customer interviews alone isn’t the only way to get insights into your customers’ needs, goals, and behaviors.
Don’t take the results of your customer interview study for gospel. Validate your findings through triangulation, or combining different research methodologies to get the full picture of your research study. (This is an especially important step when your interviews are part of a high-impact research project).
As David Travis of UserFocus says,
“Triangulation is like having different camera angles in a movie. It would be hard to understand the full picture of what is going on in a movie if every frame was shot as a close-up… Like movies, you want your research to show the close-ups but you also want to see the bigger picture.”
Don’t just regurgitate the data and notes from the study session to stakeholders. Synthesize your findings to identify specific, actionable opportunities related to your customers and the wider research objectives. (Now it’s your turn to be the storyteller!)
One way to break down your insights into their most valuable, bite-sized form is to structure your research data as “atomic research nuggets.”
However you do it, synthesizing your data into structured and digestible insights is an important step before sharing and communicating your insights to your team.
Take what you’ve learned and distill it down to 3-10 key insights.
These insights should be actionable, meaning you can at some point do something about them. Even if the solution to the problem your customers are facing is far down the line, it’s important to note that it’s there.
You can also combine the feedback you get in customer interviews with feedback from other sources, like your customer support or analytics platforms. This can help you see how much these issues affect your customers as a whole, and can help you make better decisions on how to fix your customer’s problems.
So, once you’ve found your key pieces of feedback, you’ll need a plan to take action. You can create this plan using the following steps:
Once you’ve decided which pieces of feedback to act on, map out exactly what needs to happen to achieve your goal. Be sure to follow up with each of the teams working on your solution to make sure the most important pieces of feedback have an action to follow.
Your execution plan should also involve another round of customer feedback at the end. Iteration is important, and each round of customer interviews will help you improve and iterate.
📕 For more on how to effectively analyze, synthesize, and make recommendations, check out the Analysis and Synthesis module of the UX Research Field Guide.
When you’re sharing your insights, remember that you’re telling the story of your customer’s experience with your product. Bring as much of that story to the table with you as possible.
The best way to do this is to include video clips (not the full interview!), photos, and direct quotes from your interviews. These artifacts help your team members who weren’t present for the interview see and connect with the customer. It can also help mitigate any bias you may have towards seeing a certain result from your customer interviews.
🔥 Need inspiration for your next share-out report? Check out 31 Creative UX Research Presentations and Reports – Templates and Examples.
Whether you’re interviewing customers remotely or in-person, there are a few different types of tools you’ll need to conduct interviews successfully. Here are a few tools we recommend for each step of the customer interview process:
These tools help you find, screen, schedule, track, and follow up with participants on every aspect of the interview.
Use video conferencing tools to help you host customer interviews remotely. If you’re doing them in person, you’ll need a quiet venue.
Moderating a customer interview session requires your attention and active listening skills. Use recording and note-taking tools to help you gather data to analyze during and after the session.
Qualitative insights from customer interviews require thorough analysis after sessions to ensure complete understanding. Use qualitative research analysis tools to help you make sense of the insights you’ve gathered after the fact, and store them in an organized repository of insights to build long-term organizational learning from continuous research over time.
When you’re drowning in textual data from customer interviews, data visualization tools can help you recognize trends and communicate your customers’ stories with easy-to-understand visual representations. Use data visualization to help you make sense of your qualitative data and to share your customer interview findings with the rest of your team.
Here are a few data visualization tools to help you draw better conclusions from your customer interviews:
🗺️ Want to explore more tools for UX research? Look up almost any UX research tool you can imagine in the 2022 User Interviews Tools Map.
As Julie Zhou, Co-founder of Sundial, said:
“To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.”
Whether you want to get a general understanding of your customers or find product/market fit, start by directly talking to your customers.
At User Interviews, we help you find the right people to talk to. Recruit provides on-demand access to our target network of 3 million research participants. Launch a study in minutes, source participants in hours, and complete your customer interviews in days.
For user research at scale, build your panel of thousands (or millions) of users with Research Hub to enable self-serve recruitment and automated studies for all your customer interviews.
Content Marketing Manager
Content writer. Marketing enthusiast. INFJ. Inspired by humans and their stories. She spends ridiculous amounts of time on Duolingo and cooking new recipes.
