Why it is important to talk to the customer and what to watch out for

If you're building a house to last for generations, you need a solid foundation. That's why you study the terrain where you're going to build and design the foundation so that your house will last as long as possible. When we design a product, those foundations are our customer. The market for digital products is dynamic, new players are coming in and customers are gradually becoming more demanding. But how do we find out what the customer needs, how can we win them over and retain them in a world where demands, needs and expectations for quality are constantly changing? The best way is to talk to customers regularly and listen to them actively. 

What do customer conversations bring to the product

Customer data is key to our product strategy decisions. It's how we decide how to win customers, how to achieve customer satisfaction and how to win their loyalty. When we reach a certain number of loyal customers, we achieve steady sales, room for product development and a steady market position. When we look at customer data, we can divide it into 2 types that complement each other. Quantitative data such as statistics, counts and graphs about customers tell us who our customers are and how often they use our product. Qualitative data will develop the context of the situation, tell us why they are our customers and why they are using our product.

Customer interviews provide qualitative data. The empathy and knowledge gained will help us design a product that our customer will be happy with. However, the interviews and their meaning differ fundamentally according to the customer's steps in their customer journey. The customer journey is a sequence of steps that our customer takes from learning about the product, through the buying behaviour, during the first experience, to building brand loyalty. Each point determines whether the customer achieves loyalty or goes to a competitor.

Let's look at an example of a mobile flat rate customer journey. At the start of the journey is a customer who needs to communicate with friends without limitations, have internet connectivity, get a discount on their mobile phone and fit into their budget. First, he or she creates awareness of the products available in the market, then decides to buy a flat rate, tries it out and then decides whether to continue using the flat rate. To win the customer, we need to immerse ourselves in their situation every step of the way. 

Interviewing the customer before getting to know the product

 The customer decides to find a flat rate that fits their current needs. He searches for flat-rates on search engines, asks friends what they prefer or comes to the operator's brick-and-mortar shop for advice. This customer tells us what product he needs, when he wants to find out about it. Analyzing the behavior and preferences of potential customers will help us personalize our product and better target our marketing communications.

What we can find out from the customer:

• Who our customer is and what they do. 
• What they need to achieve. 
• How would he look for such a solution. 
• What experience does he have with the products on the market. 

How we will use it:

• We will design product content and features tailored to the customer's needs, problems and expectations, thereby increasing its perceived value and the price the customer is willing to pay for the product. 
• We personalize marketing communications to effectively reach different types of our customers, improving search rankings and promotional effectiveness. 
• We identify product strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace to uncover opportunities to gain a competitive advantage. 

Interviewing the customer who buys the product 

Once the customer has developed an awareness of the flat rate offerings, they begin to decide what flat rate suits them and why, before making a purchase. During their flat rate purchase, they compare and consider whether the flat rate suits them better than the competition, whether they will get a discount on a mobile device if they commit to it for a longer period, whether it meets their needs and whether they are willing to pay for our flat rate. Understanding our customer's buying behaviour and preferences will help us design a smooth and simple buying process.

We can find out from the customer:

• How they think when buying our product. 
• What motivates our customer to try our product. 
• What barriers prevent him from trying it. 
• What are the critical things that make him decide to try the product. 
• What he is willing to pay for the product. 

How we're going to use it:

• We will communicate the key features of the product that will motivate the customer to try the product, thus increasing customer interest and interaction in the product channels. 
• We will simplify the path and minimize barriers to trying the product, thereby increasing the number of visits to the product offering and increasing the number of completed purchases. 
• We will design a personalised and customer-friendly offer to increase the number of completed purchases 

Interview the customer after a fresh experience with the product 

A flat rate customer started using prepaid minutes and data after purchase. He checks his current usage, monitors how much data he has used. He finds out whether or not he has stable data coverage. After a month, he gets his first invoice, where he finds out if he has overdrawn his flat rate and is paying something extra, or if something has been carried over to the next period. 

After the initial experience with the product, the customer tells us how we have or have not met their initial expectations, what has been giving them problems and whether they will continue to use our product. Analyzing the customer's initial experience will help us optimize the path to trying the product and improve the first experience with our product.

What we can find out from the customer:

• How satisfied is the customer with the product. 
• How they rate the first experience. 
• What positive and negative experiences did he have. 
• What would he change and why. 
• Whether he is willing to use it again and why. 

How we will use it: 

• We optimize the steps that were challenging and slowed the customer down in the initial experience. 
• We'll improve key features and content that are essential and deliver value to the customer, with the goal of motivating the customer to repeat use. 
• We will suggest ways to keep the customer using our product multiple times.

The customer after a long-term experience with the product 

After using the product for a few months, the customer has become accustomed to using the flat-rate package, continuous monitoring of consumption and automatic payment of monthly bills. By using the flat-rate for a long time, the customer's demands for reliability increase and at the same time he starts to wonder whether his current equipment is sufficient and whether he should get a new accessory. 

A loyal customer reveals to us why he has decided to try our product repeatedly. We find out what product features - from price, features, content, offerings, branding, or rewards - kept them with our product. Understanding when and why a new customer becomes loyal will help us design a strategy to increase the number of loyal customers.

What we find out about the customer:

• Why they stayed loyal to our product. 
• What motivates him to use our product in the long term. 
• How he evaluates our product after long-term use. 
• Where he sees room for product expansion. 
• Whether he is willing to recommend our product to other people. 

How we will use it:

• We will build a system for loyal customers that will motivate customers to come back and invite new customers. 
• We will improve features and content to keep customers with our product for the long term. 
• We'll design ways to expand our offerings to increase repeat purchase rates for loyal customers.

How to interview customers the right way 

Customer interviews are always a valuable way to gain knowledge. In the early days of business, every customer interview will bear fruit. But if you're working on a complex product where each change costs in the thousands to tens of thousands, it's important to put the interviews in the hands of experts. 

Poorly executed interviews can give a distorted picture of our customers. This distorted picture will influence key decisions that impact the entire product strategy. Such decisions lead to reduced marketing performance, reduced product usage and a poorer customer experience. At the end of the day, the effect of decisions will show up in the overall costs and revenues of your business. 

What factors are key to a good customer conversation

• Customer selection: are all of our customers or do they have to meet certain characteristics? Choosing the right people will determine whether we get relevant or useless information. 
• Interview scenario: The wording, phrasing, sequence of questions and discussion topics decide whether we get superficial or rich answers and whether the information is misleading or truthful. 
• Atmosphere: The time, duration, place and manner of the interview must be set to achieve comfort, respect and openness. This will help the customer to talk openly about their experience and opinions. 
• Moderation: the moderator must be unbiased, create a positive atmosphere, ask the right questions, listen actively and respond correctly so that we understand the context and at the same time do not mislead the customer into giving misleading answers. 
• Interpretation: We must interpret the results truthfully, clearly and in the context of our product so that everyone in the project understands what we have found and why it is important.

But the hardest thing about talking to a customer is the fact that we only have 1 shot at everything to get unadulterated reactions. It only takes 1 misstep and we run the risk of finding out something that is not honest, whole or true information. That's why customer interviews require expertise and experience. 

Put your customer interviews in the hands of experts 

Creating a product today requires more than basic market research. Understanding your customers is not just a mandatory journey, but a key pillar of your strategy. At GoodRequest, we have a team of UX specialists who design experiences for a wide range of customers and a range of different products. For example, we've interviewed customers on the following projects:

• In an online fitness experience improvement project, we talked to members of the online fitness community. We found out how they exercise at home, what types of exercises they prefer and what motivates them to exercise. This revealed to us how to improve exercise personalisation and advice.
• While designing the attendance management tool, we spoke with HR staff who detailed the process for approving employee absences, which we translated into streamlining and automating the work for approving absences.
• Due to the redesign of online ordering of home EV chargers, we spoke with EV owners who explained the challenges associated with home charging and what they needed to do in online ordering. According to them, we changed the ordering process to a configurator that better covers different customer situations.
• In order to optimize the work with the AI tool for managing online discussions, we talked to its users, who described to us how they work with comments, how AI helps them in their work and, conversely, what slows them down. Analyzing their work helped us come up with a new design that made working with the tool easier and faster.
• In designing a new experience for readers of the online diary, we talked to its readers about how they find the content they want to read and how they habitually read it. Understanding the reading behavior of online articles helped us design simpler navigation and improve the presentation of new articles.

If you're dealing with a complex product, we recommend you understand your customer and your product's role in their lives in depth, but without study and experience, we don't recommend going it alone. You can very easily burn your time, energy and money. So if you need to optimize your customer journey and don't have the expertise you need, feel free to contact us and we'll be happy to help you optimize your customer experience.