Process
Your first customer interview: recruit, ask, listen, follow up
A five-step guide for anyone running their first customer interview. It covers who to recruit, how to structure an interview guide, the question starters that get stories instead of opinions, the 80/20 listening rule, and the follow-ups that dig deeper. Use it to prepare for a first conversation with a customer. Once you have run a few by hand, Koji can run the same interviews with AI at a larger scale.
Where this appears
What's in this process
- Recruit the right participants: Start small. Existing customers, recent churns and prospects who fit your target market.
- Create an interview guide: Introduction, warm-up, core questions and wrap-up, with open-ended questions that get people talking.
- Ask better questions: Start with 'Tell me about a time when...' and skip leading, yes/no, hypothetical and jargon-heavy questions.
- Listen more than you talk: Aim for the participant talking 80% of the time. Embrace silence and follow interesting tangents.
- Go deeper with follow-ups: Ask for more, for an example, or what happened next. Leave the script when something interesting comes up.
Use this image
Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:
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<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/first-customer-interview-recruit-ask-listen-follow-up"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/first-customer-interview-recruit-ask-listen-follow-up/first-customer-interview-recruit-ask-listen-follow-up.png" alt="Process showing five steps for a first customer interview: recruit the right people, write a guide, ask better questions, listen, and follow up." width="1200" height="792" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/first-customer-interview-recruit-ask-listen-follow-up">Your first customer interview: recruit, ask, listen, follow up</a>, Koji</p>
