Customer interviews

What a customer interview is

A customer interview is a recorded conversation between me and one of your clients, usually thirty to forty-five minutes, about why they hired you, what worried them first, and what has changed since. You get the recording, an edited transcript, a short list of quotes the client has cleared in writing, and a note on what came up that you did not know.

It is not a satisfaction survey. Nobody is scored out of ten and nothing is averaged. It is also not a case study, though a case study nearly always starts here. The interview is the raw material, sold on its own, and it is yours to write from or to hand to whoever writes for you.

The argument for buying it separately is simple. A client will tell a stranger things they will not tell you. They will say they nearly went with someone else, and why. They will say the sentence that explains your business better than your website does, casually, because nobody is selling to them.

When you need one

You need interviews before writing anything that depends on a customer's own words: proof content, a rewrite of the pages that sell, a new set of messages. Writing those from your own assumptions is how a business ends up describing a service nobody buys it for.

You need them when proof is the bottleneck. Most firms can find a writer. What stalls a year of case studies is that nobody books the calls. Three interviews arranged in a fortnight keep a small business in material for months.

You do not need this if you have already recorded the conversations yourself and only want them written up. Send me the files and the job becomes turning an existing recording into a finished piece, which costs less. You also do not need it if your real question is about the market rather than your customers. That is wider research into who is actually buying, and it has to include people who did not choose you.

What I ask

Every interview runs on the same spine, adapted to your trade, and leaves it whenever the client wants to talk about something more useful than the next question.

• The situation before. What was happening that made them start looking. This is where the usable language is, because your next buyer is using it this week.
• What else they considered. Who was in the running, including doing nothing, and what decided it. Clients answer this plainly to a third party and vaguely to their supplier.
• The hesitation. What nearly stopped them signing. Price is the usual stated answer and rarely the real one.
• What actually happened. The work as they experienced it, including anything that went wrong.
• What they would tell someone like them. The closing question, and reliably the one that produces the quotable sentence.

I do not ask leading questions and I do not invite a client to agree with a claim you would like to make. If they say something unflattering it goes in the findings note, unattributed if that is what it takes.

What you get

The recordings and transcripts. Each call transcribed and lightly edited so it can be read, with timestamps against anything quotable, so you can hear the tone before you use the words. Both are yours to reuse without asking.

Cleared quotes. The six to ten strongest sentences from each interview, tidied only for grammar and length, sent back to the client and confirmed in writing as approved for your materials. Anything without that confirmation is marked unusable and stays out.

The findings note. Two or three pages across the whole set: what customers agree on, where they contradict what you assumed, the words they use for what you sell, and the doubts they nearly acted on. This is often worth more than the case study the interviews were booked for.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Winnipeg firm that installs and services commercial refrigeration books four interviews, intending to turn the best one into a case study for a tender. The calls run about forty minutes each and are done inside two weeks.

Three of the four customers describe the same thing without being prompted. They did not choose the firm for the installation. They chose it because a technician answered a call on a Sunday in the first month. One restaurant owner says he had assumed a smaller supplier would be slower to respond and found the opposite. None of them mention the equipment brands the home page leads with. The case study gets written and opens on the Sunday call, but the findings note changes more: the home page is rewritten around response time, two quotes go to the top of the testimonial page, and the line about smaller suppliers becomes the first entry in the objections document. Four calls, and the firm stops leading with the wrong thing.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which customers, what you want to learn, and what the material is for. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of interviews and what comes back, agreed before anything starts.
3. The introduction. You email each customer and introduce me, in a short paragraph I will draft for you. People say yes far more often when the ask comes from you.
4. Booking and interviewing. I arrange each call directly at the customer's convenience, record with their permission, and keep to the time agreed.
5. Transcription and clearance. Transcripts within three working days of each call. Quotes go back to the customer for approval the same week.
6. Delivery. Recordings, transcripts, cleared quotes and the findings note together, with a half-hour session walking you through what came up.

Two to three weeks for a set of three to five interviews is typical. The customers' diaries set the pace, not the work.

What it costs

Interviews are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so a set is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. What moves the number is how many interviews there are, whether the findings note covers the set or each call, and whether I chase the bookings or your office does. A set of three or more costs less per interview, because the question spine and the clearance process are built once.

What happens next

Material from a set of interviews usually ends up in three places. The strongest engagement becomes a document a salesperson can send, or a shorter warm write-up where figures are off limits. The cleared quotes go onto a page of attributed quotes, sharpened first by editing each one back past the customer. And the language belongs in the pages that describe what you sell and in a written set of approved messages. None of that is assumed. The recordings, transcripts, cleared quotes and findings note are a complete piece of work on their own.