What questions you should be asking

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our academy series in this video i'm going to talk about the types of questions that you can ask in your customer interviews now first of all it's important to get into the right interview mentality and that is your customer should be doing about 95% of the talking you're really just here to listen and notice what they're saying as objectively as possible and another important thing is to not avoid uncomfortable questions and that's because you're looking for pain points and this is problems or frustrations that your customers are having that you can solve and often when a customer talks about the things that upsets them or problems that they're facing it will be an uncomfortable conversation and a lot of times most people's reaction to that uncomfortableness is to fill the space by talking more but that's really a time where you want to keep listening and just absorb as much of the emotion and words that your person that you're talking to is sane and in that sense it's very important that you're always listening intently you're looking for changes in the tone of their voice and also the words that they're saying and finally you want to ask the question why a lot so if they say this is hard for me you ask why is that hard and you keep digging deeper and it's not it's not so important that you use the word why but it's the reason behind why you would use that word which is to just dig deeper and find out more you don't want to just take their answer at face value you want to learn as much as you possibly can so here are three scenarios that you'll have when you're doing customer interviews the first scenario is you're trying to find a problem to solve so in this case you're coming in with a blank slate so some of the questions you could ask or walk me through a typical day in your job or what's the most frustrating part your job and then if they give you an answer you can ask why is that hard or what takes up the majority of your time now the second scenario is when you have an idea of a problem but you want to find out if that's really a problem that people are having you want to validate that that's a problem so there is an excellent blog post with the video to go with it and I'll include a link in the description to this video but I highly recommend you watch it it's about seven minutes and it'll really help you ask the right questions that validate the problem you're going after without putting words in your customers mouth so some example questions are what's the hardest part about the problem context so it could be what's the hardest part about finding a vegan restaurant in the city or you can use can you tell me about the last time that happened and then again here's that question that pops up why was that hard we really want to dig deep and get those uncomfortable answers the last scenario is you already have an established business and you're looking for business improvements and some questions you can ask or what did you hope this product or service would solve before you used it and what else could this product or service do to help you solve your problem now the reason why I didn't want to include too many of these preset questions is in most interviews there are no preset questions and if you come in with these questions it's going to freeze you up and you're not going to have a really spontaneous or authentic conversation so this is something that'll just get better as you practice more customer interviews but you really want to be loose and able to change what you're asking based on your customers responses and like I said you'll become better at asking the right questions over time so don't worry about asking the perfect questions especially in the beginning this is something that will come naturally just remember to come in with that mindset of wanting to know why things are hard and just trying to gain as much information as possible and the key to doing that is to listen carefully.