My first 90 days as a VP of Marketing (#F90D), is a series of posts following my work as the new VP of Marketing at Mindspace.me, a Workspace as a Service provider. If you’re just joining, you can start with Week 1 here.
To learn more about Mindspace and the Flexible Space market, I started interviewing customers (you can read more about how you can find the truth about your company here). Before starting the interviews, I wanted learn what to ask and how to conduct an effective customer interview. After my LinkedIn cry for help yielded only a few likes and no real ideas, I turned to Google for some help.
Customer interviews are not a new thing. Companies all around do them for various reasons: market research, product feedback, customer service, new product scoping, usability testing and more. I wanted to focus on value and brand perception so I can compare what we think our customers like about us to what they really do.
After a short search on Google, I found these two great posts on customer interviews. The first one, by Emily Palermo of Drive Research, offered 5 questions to ask in a Voice of the Customer interview. The second, a great post by Dustin Walker on CrazyEgg, offered tips, questions, and ideas on customer interviews. Between these two posts, I felt I had everything I needed (I did read/skim about 20 other posts though, just to be safe).
My Initial Interview Questions
To my first customer interview, I prepared the following questions:
- What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you hear the name Mindspace?
- On a scale of 1–10 how likely are you to recommend Mindspace to a friend or colleague?
- Which of the following factors matter most when selecting a company for co-working/flexible space (please only choose 1)? (I listed 6 factors I collected)
- How satisfied are you with each of the following factors with Mindspace? (I listed the same 6 factors)
- How did you hear about us?
- What made you sign with us?
- What would make you stay?
- What would make you leave?
I went to the first interview armed with these questions and the tips I collected and after the first few minutes of introductions and pleasantries, when I tried to jump right into the questions, the customer simply started talking about Mindspace: what they liked, what they didn’t like, why we’re different, why they chose us, what we’re doing great, what we’re doing badly, and a bunch of other stories and information I was trying to capture as fast as I could. It was a goldmine of insights and information, and I didn’t even had to ask a single question. At the end of the 30 minutes I scheduled for us, I looked down at the questions I wrote, and realized I had most of the questions answered, but trying to ask the questions I didn’t get answers for seems too forced, so we ended the interview and said goodbye.
Back at my desk, I organized my notes and prepared for the next interview. I rearranged the questions and changed a few of them to make them “flow” better. The next interview was nothing like the first one. This time, I had to lead the interview and follow my list of questions until I finished all of them with about 10 minutes to spare. I then improvised a few follow up and deep-dive questions and ended the interview a few minutes early.
The other interviews I conducted were also very different. Some were organized and structured, some were free form and flowing, and some were simply a mess. At some point, I started recognizing the connecting themes that I was looking for. It wasn’t explicit, but once I recognized a theme, I started asking more questions about it to uncover more insight on that topic. For example, the sales experience was brought up in the first two interviews as a positive highlight of their overall experience. So in the next few interviews, I purposefully asked about it to see if there’s a common experience that we can build on. I tried to identify more of those themes so I can use them in future interviews.
My Final/Current Interview Questions
After several interviews, I started having a better structure to the interview and the list of questions I needed to ask. Since I will continue to conduct these interviews in the next few weeks, I suspect that these structure and questions will also evolve.
- Tell me about your company and about what you do
- Tell me about your first experience with Mindspace
- What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you hear the name Mindspace?
- What made you sign with us? Did you look at competitors or alternatives? Why did you choose us over them?
- What were the most important factors for you when you chose Mindspace?
- On a scale of 1–10 how likely are you to recommend Mindspace to a friend or colleague?
- How did you hear about us?
- What would make you stay?
- What would make you leave?
I plan on interviewing a dozen more customers in the next few weeks, cultivating insight and feedback that I can use to clarify our value proposition and the areas we need to work on. For now, it feels that with every interview I get closer to the truth , I just wonder when it will start feeling repetitive or confusing.