How customer interviews help you make better strategic choices
Many organisations know their customers better than they think, but not as well as they hope. Yes, you may receive feedback from sales and enquiries via customer service, you follow their behaviour in dashboards and speak to them regularly. Yet, that does not qualify as real customer insight. After all, there is a big difference between ‘we hear this often’ and ‘we know this is really important’.
That difference becomes crucial when you have to make choices: launching a new offering, refining your positioning, revamping a website or determining which message truly resonates with your target audience. In such cases, customer interviews can deliver significant value – provided they do more than just casually collect a few conversations. Good customer interviews help you test your own assumptions, uncover priorities and better substantiate decisions.
Where traditional interviews sometimes fall short
Many teams start customer interviews with the best of intentions. They prepare questions, conduct interviews, take notes and collect quotes. However, all too often they end up with a lot of information and little direction. Which input is just a random opinion and what is actually important? What themes recur across multiple customers? And which insights call for action? Without structure, customer interviews quickly become a loose collection of casual anecdotes: interesting to read, but useless as a basis for strategic decisions.
Start with your own assumptions
A strong customer interview begins long before you speak to customers. So don’t jump into drafting a lengthy questionnaire at random; first, lay bare your own assumptions. What do you think customers are trying to achieve? What benefits or outcomes are they seeking? And where do you think they’re getting stuck?
Group all possible internal assumptions into three categories:
- Customer tasks: what is your customer trying to achieve?
- Pain points: what makes that difficult, frustrating or risky?
- Desired benefits: what results, experiences or improvements is your customer looking for?
Sticking to this structure helps keep the conversation focused on the customer’s needs rather than your own solution. You start not from what you want to sell, but from the customer’s real-life perspective.
Make the conversation concrete
Moving on to the customer conversation itself. It will be more effective if you don’t just ask questions, but also put something tangible on the table. For example, show cards listing the customer tasks, pain points and desired benefits that you formulated in advance. Or use simple visual exercises, such as a card sort, where you ask the customer to rank the cards from least to most important. Or an exercise where customers sort the pain points and indicate which frustrations hold them back the most.
Moving on to the customer conversation itself. It will be more effective if you don’t just ask questions, but also put something tangible on the table. For example, show cards listing the customer tasks, pain points and desired benefits that you formulated in advance. Or use simple visual exercises, such as a card sort, where you ask the customer to rank the cards from least to most important. Or an exercise where customers sort the pain points and indicate which frustrations hold them back the most.
Let customers set priorities
Not everything a customer recognises will be equally important. That is why prioritisation is essential. Ask customers to indicate which tasks are most important to them, which pain points cause the most frustration and which benefits would really make a difference.
This step makes interviews much more useful. If several customers identify the same pain point, that is interesting information for you. If they also consistently identify it as a top priority, it becomes strategically relevant. This way, you move away from ‘hearsay’ and gradually discover what you really need to focus on.
From feedback to decisions
After a series of interviews, the real work of identifying patterns begins. Which assumptions are frequently confirmed? Which are repeatedly adjusted? Which turn out to be less important than expected? And which new insights recur time and again?
Also, remember to structure your interviews in the same way. This will make it easier to compare the answers afterwards and creates a clearer picture of your customer. By moving away from abstract profiles, you end up working with clear goals, frustrations and expectations.
Consequently, these insights can guide your positioning, brand story, content, website, campaigns, sales pitch and customer experience. You might discover that a pain point your communication focused heavily on is less important than you thought. Or that a benefit which seems obvious to you internally is actually a decisive reason for customers to choose you. Good customer interviews therefore don’t just show what customers say. They help you understand what to do with that information.
Comma helps
At Comma, we believe that every strong strategy starts with listening but doesn’t end there. Customer insights only become valuable when they are translated into clear choices regarding positioning, communication, customer journeys, content, campaigns and digital experiences.
That’s why we never view customer interviews as a stand-alone exercise, but integrate them as a key part of a broader strategic process. We help you clarify your assumptions, structure conversations, identify patterns and ultimately translate insights into concrete actions. So if you want to gain a clearer understanding of what your customers really need, we at Comma would be happy to work with you.
