Using interviews to gain customer insight: CX Mini Masterclass – E81

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX mini masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

And an added note to those who are already CCXPs. The Customer Experience Professionals Association is now recognizing CX Podcasts listening towards certification renewal credits. So be sure to jot down which episodes you’ve listened to so that you can submit this towards your continued education requirements. This is episode 81, and today I have another mini master class presented by leading customer experience expert and friend of the show, Stephanie Thum.

It’s a pleasure to have Stephanie back on the podcast again. She’s a seasoned CX professional, a CCXP, and is one of the founding members of the CXPA. She’s remained closely involved with the association, even spending some time as part of the association’s staff team. In her career as a customer experience practitioner, she’s amassed deep expertise through her diverse professional background.

She’s had the opportunity to drive customer-centric change within government. And while she’s known for her background as one of the US federal government’s first agency customer experience leads, she’s also been a practitioner and consultant in the B2B world, working with small and mid-size companies. She’s given a number of excellent CX mini masterclasses since I launched these shorter format episodes. And it’s so great to be able to share her insights with you once again.

We all know that a robust approach to voice of customer is absolutely key to customer experience management. If you’ve listened to previous episodes on this topic, you’ll know that I’m an advocate for a multi-pronged approach to understanding customers. Industries and journeys are different, so each organization needs to craft its own best strategy for understanding customers and their needs. When planning your voice of customer approach, there are many different methodologies to choose from.

In episode 79, I covered three lesser known methodologies. But I also noted that surveys, focus groups, and interviews are some of the most popular approaches out there. And with good reason, if done correctly, they can yield amazing insights. So today, Stephanie is taking us on a deep dive into the ins and outs of customer interviews.

She shares when and where this voice of customer strategy can be most useful, as well as best practices for conducting customer interviews and five practical tips for designing an interview program. If you’re looking for some tangible advice about how to leverage interviews to better understand your customers, then this episode is for you. And as always, if you happen to be making dinner or out for a jog, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

I’ll also include links to find out more about Stephanie’s work and how you can get in touch with her. So with that, I’ll let Stephanie take it away. Hey, Julia, thanks for having me back on the Mini Masterclass podcast. So customer surveys, they may be all the rage when it comes to collecting customer experience feedback data in the B2C world.

But in B2B, where human-to-human long-term relationships and RFPs rule the day, collecting feedback usually needs to take on a more human touch to have a meaningful impact. So enter the client interview, a low-volume, high-impact feedback collection approach that can fuel CX data insights in the B2B space in ways that electronic surveys simply cannot. All right, so what is a client interview program? Well, client interviews are just that, face-to-face or telephone conversations where you’re asking questions and cultivating insights from clients, decision makers, and others who influence buying decisions.

You go one-on-one with a sample of your biggest clients, or your high potential clients, or maybe it’s your at-risk clients. Maybe it’s a combination of all of those. But client interviews are not simply a regurgitation of questions you might ask on an email survey. Instead, an interviewer asks well-chosen interviewees a series of planned, yet flexible questions about their experiences with your company’s policies, processes, service, people, and products.

The point is to understand your clients’ perspectives on the nature of your business partnership and how that relationship intersects with their business challenges. So how do you set a client interview program up? Well, setting it up seems simple, right? But the reality is that great client interview programs don’t just happen.

They’re deliberately designed and systematically deployed. Here are five things to think about when you’re setting up your program. Number one, I always come back to this as being the most important part of a successful client interview program. An impartial, skilled interviewer should conduct the client interview, not a sales executive.

This is always my top recommendation for companies that want to start a client interview program. And it’s usually a point of hesitation on the part of clients I advise. But the client feedback session is not, nor should it ever be, anything like a sales call. The idea is to gather feedback that can help your company to reduce friction for the client and get ahead of issues that can cause clients to leave.

But unfortunately, sales and service team members that are too closely connected to the client can sometimes feel they have too much to lose if negative feedback surfaces in that interview. And there can be a tendency to disregard, dismiss, or even bury certain clients’ ratings and comments. Number two, take a programmatic structured approach. You’re going to want to work with the boss and with stakeholders from throughout the company to create a target client list, an interview policy, a client interview and debrief process, template communications for clients you’re targeting for an interview, a standard survey or dialogue guide with well thought out questions, and at least one punctuating metric derived from a question that’s answered by all interviewees.

You’re going to want to develop template reports for each interview or series of interviews and plan a cadence for presenting trends to leadership across client segments or verticals. Number three, make the interview mutually beneficial. Don’t waste the client’s time with superficial questions. For me, I’ve never been able to glean much from answers to questions like, how knowledgeable was our staff?

And please rate the quality of our product. Sure, the answers to those questions will tell you about your company, but that’s not enough. Use the interview to understand more about the outcomes the client is after. A favorite interview question of mine has always been, what are your business challenges coming up in the next one to two years?

And where do you see our firm fitting in? Client’s answers almost always shed light on problems and opportunities you’ll never get from a survey or a press release. Number four, create artifacts. Take good interview notes and store those notes in an organized fashion somewhere where the right people can review them at the right time, like any other source of client intelligence.

It’s common for some executives to want to skimp on documentation, which is another reason why you want a skilled interviewer conducting those interviews because they also know how to take good notes. But in the instances when you’re navigating potential client loss, you’ll be glad you wrote down the feedback somewhere besides the back of a bar napkin. And number five, don’t get mad. The only thing more dangerous than not asking clients for feedback is asking and getting angry at the client for what you hear or simply not following up at all.

So make sure a multidisciplinary team goes to work on follow-up conversations and activities immediately after that interview and start to close the loop with the clients you’ve talked to. I used to sit down once a year or so with certain clients, and for every repeat interview, the first question was always, the last time we talked, you mentioned A, B, and C. Getting very specific about what they had said previously. Then to what extent do you feel our team followed up on those things?

If the client doesn’t think you followed up, that’s a red flag. It’s time to apologize to the client and get your teams moving. In the B2B world, feedback from one-on-one client interviews can help your company to stay ahead of issues and opportunities in ways that surveys, press releases, and newspaper articles simply cannot. So ask the right questions to the right interviewees.

Get a skilled interviewer to work with you. Listen carefully, document your findings, and share insights across the organization, and of course, take action. Thanks for listening and hope to talk to you again soon. Bye for now.

So there you have it. Special guest, Stephanie Thum, taking us through the benefits of customer interviews, and five best practices to keep in mind if you want to include this methodology as part of your Voice of Customer program. To hear more of Stephanie’s pearls of wisdom, be sure to check out her previous CX Mini Masterclass guest appearances. In episode 45, she shared insights on reframing how organizations think of customers.

episode 50 featured her take on the status of CX in government. episode 55 included her advice to CEOs on how to lead customer-centric change. And in episode 63, she talked about how to maximize the impact of customer experience metrics. Links to all of these podcasts will be available in the show notes for this episode, along with a summary of her five tips from today and information on how to get in touch with Stephanie.

If you’re on Twitter, her handle is at Stephanie Thum. She’s active on this platform and is always sharing great gems and insights. Plus, adorable photos of her dog, Dash. I’ll be back next Thursday with another CX Mini Masterclass episode.

If you’d like to get in touch in the meantime, you can send me an email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back next week.