Deploy Empathy

A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

Michele Hansen

• Publisher: Dotsquare LLC
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781737446613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

Deploy Empathy will help you learn the skill of talking to your customers-learning to truly listen to them-so that you can pull out their hidden needs, desires, and processes.

Empathy is a skill that anyone can learn. Armed with the tactics you'll learn in this book and the toolbox of scripts and phrases, you'll be able to sell more of your existing product, build the right features that will delight your customers, and stop churn in its tracks.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to interview customers and potential customers with confidence.

Part 7

Interviews

Knowing which questions to ask is the hardest part of an interview.

You probably know you shouldn’t ask, “Would you buy this?” or, “What are your pain points?,” yet going from what you shouldn’t do to what you should do is a big leap.

This part is your springboard to asking useful and impactful questions in common situations:

• Discovery interviews, when you’re exploring a new idea and are trying to understand a problem better
• Switch interviews, to figure out why someone switched to your product and how you can market it better to get more customers
• Long-time customer interviews, to figure out what makes people keep paying you
• Cancellation interviews, to figure out why someone canceled
• Interactive interviews, to test a prototype, wireframe, or live product with someone
• Card sorting interviews, to help you understand which problems are high-pain and underserved

These scripts have been refined over thousands of interviews. I have used them with everyone from eighteen-year-old college students creating a map for a semester project, to executives entering a new market, to ninety-year-old men who consult actuarial tables to see if they will leave enough money for their spouse if they die first.

The suggested phrasing has been used and tested in the thousands of interviews I’ve conducted, yet there are many ways to ask a question. So feel free to make them your own as long as you’re keeping the original meaning.

If you have a phrasing that you think is more effective, please email me! The more we can be a community of continual learners who share techniques, the better.

I encourage you to adapt the scripts to your purpose. Feel free to delete questions, add questions, translate them, or phrase things in a way that fits with local or industry social norms. The scripts are just a starting point, so make them work for you.

To make it easy for you to use and adapt the scripts, you can find the templates at deployempathy.com/scripts.

You will likely encounter other situations where you want to interview people. To that end, remember the overall framework for interviews:

• What they’re trying to do overall
• The steps they take to do that
• What they’ve already tried
• Where they spend time and money throughout the entire process
• How often they experience the problem
• How long it takes them

38

Interview Preparation

Conduct interviews over audio (and screen share only when necessary)

Most UX literature will suggest you try to meet in person with people. If you’re working with a physical product, this is often critical.

If you have easy physical access to customers, you can consider meeting them in person at a neutral location (say, a coffee shop) or their office or home (if that’s critical to understanding the problem). For example, Robert Balazsi, a developer and indie hacker living in Romania, arranges interview with people in his target market in person at coffee shops.

Yet doing in-person interviews also introduces complications to the flow of the interview—even a video chat interview. If the other person can see your face, they can try to read your facial expressions and might hold back if it seems like you aren’t interested or are about to say something.

I’ve found that people are much more willing to be open on an audio call than they are on video. It also removes the stress of monitoring your facial expressions and frees you up to take notes.

In some ways, you want the other person to forget you’re a person with your own thoughts and judgments. Doing interviews over audio removes the body language variable and can be a shortcut to deep insights.

Even if you’re using a video conferencing platform, make it clear it’s audio-only. (Even better, only put the call-in phone number in the calendar invite.)

In some cases, it’s helpful to have someone screen share with you and walk you through their process and how they use tools (including yours). Or you might want them to test a prototype. For screen-share calls, see Chapter 43 for the Interactive Interview script.

In-person interviews or observation may make sense for your product, though. If you have easy physical access to your customers, it’s worth getting a copy of Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users, which focuses on in-person interviewing.

Mute your phone and notifications

The key to active listening is giving someone your full attention.

Before the interview starts, put your phone on mute and silence your notifications. It may even help to move to another room to force yourself to adopt a different mindset.

Set yourself up to be able to focus

If getting yourself into the zone to be a “sponge” that deeply focuses on what someone else is saying is challenging for you, it may also help to be attuned to your body and do some advance prep to set it up to be able to focus.

This will mean different things for different people.

It may mean keeping an eye on how much caffeine you have that morning (as caffeine can lead some people to excited overtalking), the food you eat that day, remembering to take medication or vitamins, or whether you exercise that day. I trust you have figured what your body needs, if anything, in order to be able to focus at this point in your life.

Treat the day you do a customer interview like you would an important job interview or meeting.

Aim for five people; repeat in cycles of five with a narrower scope if necessary

For a discrete, well-scoped problem, the minimum number of people to interview is five.

As Jim Kalbach recommends in The Jobs to Be Done Playbook, you might need more interviews until you start hearing the same things over and over again. “You’ll know when you’ve done enough interviews when you can start predicting how people will respond,” in Kalbach’s words.¹

If you find yourself with five interviews under your belt and you’re hearing wildly different things from each person, that’s a sign your problem definition scope could be narrowed down. This is especially common in the discovery stage when talking to people who aren’t customers.

See Chapter 16 for more on how many people to talk to, and Chapter 17 regarding research loops.

It’s okay if the interview doesn’t follow the exact question order

Interviews often veer into territory you hadn’t expected. Indeed, that can be the sign of a great interview!

I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview follow the exact order I laid out in the script, and that’s okay. Don’t feel like you need to force the person to follow your order. Let them wander a bit, and gently guide them to your questions or to the concepts you’re interested in as necessary.

It’s also common for someone to answer one question in the course of another question. If that happens, don’t feel like you need to as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Quotes
• Contents
• I. Using This Book
• II. Key Frameworks
• III. Getting Started
• IV. When Should You Do Interviews?
• V. Recruiting Participants
• VI. How to Talk So People Will Talk
• VII. Interviews
• VIII. Analyzing Interviews
• IX. Pulling It All Together: Sample Interview
• X. What Now?
• Appendix A: Cheat Sheet
• Appendix B: For Founders
• Notes
• Thanks
• About the Author