How to interview customers without leading them
Ask about the last time they did the task, not what they think in general. Keep questions free of your own words, stay quiet after they answer, record the session, and write down what they did rather than what they liked.
This is for anyone who keeps running customer interviews and keeps hearing back exactly what the team already believed. If that is happening, look at how the questions are worded before you blame the customers.
What follows is how to interview customers so the answers are about what they actually did. It is the same approach used in workshops with Philippine banks and insurers since 2015, and it works whether you have a research lab or a meeting room and a phone on a stand.
No new tools needed. You just ask differently.
Worry when every customer agrees with you
A common version of this: The team thinks customers abandon onboarding because the form is long. Someone books six interviews. The first question is "how did you find the length of the form?" All six say it was long. The PowerPoint gets written.
The form may well be long. But that session proved nothing, because the answer was in the question. Customers are polite, especially with a bank. Ask them to agree and most will.
You can check this after the session. Read your discussion guide and count how many questions contain a word the customer did not say first. Long, easy, confusing, helpful, secure. Every one of those is your word. Swap them for a request: "walk me through the last time you tried to open an account."
The answers come out slower and messier, and that is the part you can use.
Ask about the last time they did it
People are vague about what they usually do. Ask about one specific time and the detail comes back.
So anchor everything to one real event. "When did you last update your details?" Then follow it forward. Where were you. What device. What did you do first. What happened next. Who did you call. How long did it take.
This is also where turnaround time stops being a guess. Ask a branch staff member to describe the last application they processed end to end and you often get a number nobody in head office had: the two days it sat waiting for a scanned ID, the extra call to the customer about a mismatched address.
Avoid anything that starts "would you" or "how likely are you to". People are bad at predicting their own behaviour and generous when asked to imagine. "I would definitely use that" tells you nothing. If a customer shows you the workaround they already use, that is the most useful thing you will get.
Stop explaining the screen
If you are watching someone use the journey, the hardest part is keeping quiet while they struggle.
The instinct is to help. They hover over the wrong button and you say "it's the one below". Now you will never know how long they would have been stuck on their own, which is the thing you came to find out.
So set the rules up front: "I did not build this, so you cannot hurt my feelings. If you get stuck, say what you are thinking and I will just watch." Then sit on your hands. Count to ten before you intervene. Only rescue them when they are genuinely about to give up, and note the point where you stepped in, because that point is the finding.
Record the session on video, with permission. A short clip of someone failing the ID upload ends an argument that the slides never will. If you want the output of the session to be a number rather than a wall of notes, this piece on getting a drop-off number out of the session covers how to set that up.
Leave the silence alone
Most interviewers fill gaps. The customer finishes a sentence, there is three seconds of nothing, and the interviewer jumps in with the next question or, worse, a suggestion.
The first half of an answer is the tidy version people give strangers. Wait, and the second half is where the complaint about the branch queue turns up.
So after they stop talking, say nothing. Nod, look at your notes, count to five. If they have not started again, use a prompt that adds nothing of your own: "tell me more about that", or "what happened next".
Also watch the note taker. If a second person in the room is typing loudly every time the customer says something the team likes, the customer notices and gives you more of it. Brief the note taker to write everything, including the boring parts.
Write down what they did
After the session, most people write up their findings as opinions. "Customers like the new design." That sentence cannot be tested and cannot be compared to anything next quarter.
Write behaviour instead. Four of five people could not find where to upload the ID. Three called the hotline before finishing. The task took eleven minutes for the fastest person. Those hold up in a review meeting with your boss, and they give you a baseline for the next round.
Without the before numbers, none of those results could be proved. A large insurer used to take six months or more to build a customer-facing web journey. With five-day design sprints, the new journeys were designed and tested with customers in two weeks and live in four. Completion rates on the new journeys rose 80 per cent and the old drop-off points disappeared. That was only provable because someone wrote down the before numbers first.
If you want this running every month instead of once before a launch, one-off research or monthly insight sets out the difference. And if there is pressure to add AI to the same journey, fix the journey before you put AI on it.
What to do this week
- Read your current discussion guide and delete every question containing a word you supplied, such as easy, long or helpful.
- Rewrite the first question as "walk me through the last time you did this".
- Record the next five sessions on video, with permission, and clip the moments where someone gets stuck.
- Write your findings as counts and times, not as likes and dislikes, and keep them as the before number.
- Take two clips into your boss's next review instead of a summary of six interviews.
More on Customer research
- Customer research for bank onboarding and account opening teams
- One-off customer research or monthly insight: which suits you
- Instead of a customer satisfaction survey, record five people using it
- Instead of another internal review, watch five customers use it
- Instead of sticky notes on a wall, get a drop-off number out of the session
- Everything on Customer research
Questions people ask
How many customers do we need to interview?
Five people using the real journey on video will show you most of the obvious breakages. More than that is useful for measurement, not for finding the first set of problems.
What is a leading question in a customer interview?
Any question that puts your words or your hoped-for answer into the customer's mouth, such as asking whether something was easy or whether a new feature would be helpful.
Should we record customer interviews?
Yes. Notes get filtered by whoever is writing them. A clip of a customer stuck on the ID upload screen ends the argument in the review meeting faster than a summary slide.
What do we do with the findings afterwards?
Turn them into a number you can compare against later, such as how many of the five finished the task and how long it took. Fix the journey before adding anything new on top of it.
On-Off Group trains teams, tests products with real customers, finds where a transformation has stalled and builds what gets it moving, for banks, insurers and enterprises in the Philippines, since 2015. How we help with customer research.
