User Interview Script Template: A Free, Copy-Paste Script for Customer Interviews (2026)

A user interview script is the word-for-word runsheet a moderator follows during a customer interview: how to open, the exact questions to ask, when to probe, and how to close. The template below is free to copy, works for discovery, usability, and churn interviews, and takes about 30-45 minutes to run live. If you would rather not moderate every session yourself, a platform like Koji turns this same script into an AI-moderated interview that runs 24/7, probes every answer with adaptive follow-ups, and analyzes all the transcripts for you - so you get the depth of a 1:1 interview without booking a single call.

What a user interview script is (and why you need one)

A script is not a rigid questionnaire you read like a robot. It is a structured guide that keeps every interview consistent enough to compare while leaving room to follow interesting threads. Without one, interviews drift, moderators ask leading questions, and you cannot aggregate findings across sessions because everyone was asked something different.

A good script does three jobs: it builds rapport so people open up, it sequences questions from broad to specific so you do not bias early answers, and it tells the moderator where to probe for the why behind a surface response. Research consistently shows that the richest insights come from follow-up questions, not the planned ones - which is exactly where most human-moderated interviews fall short and where AI moderation shines.

The complete user interview script template

Copy the sections below and adapt the bracketed parts to your study.

1. Introduction and consent (2-3 minutes)

"Hi [name], thanks so much for making time today. I am [your name] from [company], and we are trying to understand how people [problem space] so we can build better products. There are no right or wrong answers - I am genuinely just here to learn from your experience. This will take about [30] minutes. Is it okay if I record so I do not have to scribble notes and can stay focused on what you are saying?"

Why it works: it lowers the stakes ("no right or wrong answers"), sets the time expectation, and gets explicit consent before recording.

2. Warm-up and context (3-5 minutes)

"To start, can you tell me a bit about your role and what a typical week looks like for you?" "How does [problem space / product category] fit into that?"

Why it works: easy questions build momentum and give you the context you need to interpret everything that follows.

3. Past behavior and the core problem (10-15 minutes)

Anchor on real, recent events rather than hypotheticals. This is the heart of the script.

"Tell me about the last time you [did the relevant task]. Walk me through what happened, start to finish." "What were you trying to accomplish?" "What was the most frustrating part of that?" "What did you do next? Why that?" "How are you solving this today - even if it is a workaround or a spreadsheet?"

Probing prompts to keep handy: "Can you say more about that?", "What do you mean by [their word]?", "Why was that important to you?", "How did that make you feel?". The Mom Test rule applies: ask about their life and past actions, not whether they like your idea.

4. Specific evaluation or concept reaction (5-10 minutes)

If you are testing a concept, prototype, or feature, introduce it here - never at the start.

"I am going to show you [concept]. As you look at it, please think out loud - tell me what you notice and what you expect to happen." "On a scale of 1 to 5, how well does this fit a real need you have? What makes it a [their number] and not higher?"

The scale-then-probe pattern captures a comparable number AND the reasoning behind it.

5. Wrap-up (2-3 minutes)

"If you had a magic wand and could fix one thing about [problem space], what would it be?" "Is there anything I should have asked you but did not?" "Thank you - this was incredibly helpful."

The "anything I should have asked" question routinely surfaces the single best insight of the session.

Customize the script for your study type

• Discovery interviews: weight sections 2-3. You want lived experience and unmet needs, not feature reactions.
• Usability interviews: make section 4 the bulk - use think-aloud and task scenarios.
• Churn / cancellation interviews: in section 3, anchor on the moment they decided to leave: "Take me back to when you first thought about cancelling - what was going on?"
• Win-loss interviews: probe the decision criteria and the alternatives they compared you against.

Turn your script into an AI-moderated interview with Koji

The limitation of any written script is that it only runs as fast as you can schedule and sit through calls. Ten interviews can eat a full week. Koji removes that bottleneck: you paste your script (or let the AI consultant draft one from your research goal), and Koji runs every interview for you by voice or text, in the participant's language, from a single shareable link.

What makes the AI moderation faithful to a good script:

• Adaptive follow-up probing. Koji does not just read your questions - it listens to each answer and asks the same "why" and "tell me more" follow-ups a skilled moderator would, going several layers deep on vague responses.
• Structured questions. Beyond open-ended discovery, you can add any of Koji's six structured question types - open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, and yes_no - so your scale-then-probe moments (section 4) produce both a chartable number and the qualitative reasoning.
• Consistent every time. Every participant gets the same well-sequenced script with zero moderator fatigue, zero leading questions, and zero scheduling.
• Automatic analysis. Instead of re-watching recordings, you get an analyzed report with themes, representative quotes, and quantitative breakdowns across all interviews.

The practical result: a script that would take you two weeks to run across 30 people as live calls runs in parallel overnight, and you read the insights the next morning. Text interviews cost 1 credit and voice interviews cost 3; the free tier includes 10 credits so you can pilot your script before committing.

Common script mistakes to avoid

1. Leading questions. "Don't you find the old way frustrating?" plants the answer. Ask "How do you feel about the current way?" instead.
2. Stacking questions. Asking three things at once means you get an answer to one. Ask one, then probe.
3. Hypotheticals. "Would you use this?" predicts nothing. Anchor on what they actually did.
4. Skipping the probe. The planned question opens the door; the follow-up walks through it. If your script has no probing prompts, add them.
5. Talking too much. Aim for an 80/20 split - the participant should be doing most of the talking.

Related Resources

• Structured Questions Guide - the six question types and when to use each
• Discussion Guide Template - a higher-level planning template to pair with this script
• User Interview Guide Template - structure your overall interview plan
• Probing Questions for User Interviews - 40+ follow-up prompts to go deeper
• Open-Ended Questions in AI Interviews - how Koji probes free-form answers
• How AI Interviewers Work - the mechanics behind automated moderation