Master Customer & User Interviews | Know Exactly What To Ask

NEW TO UDEMY 2020

ONE OF THE BEST RAPID RESEARCH METHODS OUT THERE

FREE downloadable template that you can use with every customer or client interview.

Are you ready to make a difference to your business and upgrade your skills?

In this course you will learn everything you need to know about understanding customers and client needs quickly and you’ll be ready to jump straight into your next meeting and see the difference.

This course is taught by an award winning designer/researcher who has worked on over 200+ projects in his career spanning a wide range of sectors from toys, gambling, industrial machinery, finance, health and fast fashion. Gary has worked for several well known innovation agencies and taught this method at several universities. This technique has been considered by many clients, agencies and students as being a game changer for them and their projects and is starting to become ingrained into different brands, making it a must have for any person in a client or customer facing role.

I have minimised the super technical and boring parts of research to keep the course short, sweet and as close to reality as possible.

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven

Before we dig deep into the GRAMS model, I thought I would share a very quick example of how the GRAMS model would work in a real interview.

G is for GOALS

I've heard this part referred to as Jobs to be done, tasks, end state, objective, outcome etc.

The is normally our starting block and often the easiest area to cover. We want to understand less about who they are, what car they drive etc. and more about what they are simply trying to do. I've seen many occasions where the differences in GOALS actually becomes the main way of classifying our different Persona profiles.

Simple open ended questions such as, "What made you use this service?" or "What are you trying to do?" etc.

You may have noticed that I used the word "What". It's probably the word I use the most in all my interviews and as we go along the course you'll see why.

As we go along the course, that the more we understand their motives, just what is driving them, the more clarification you will get behind their GOALS.

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven

R is for REALITY

This is the area where we tend to spend most of our time. There are too many insights that comes from learning about the HOW behind someones experience.

I also share a concept I call FATI. It's a way to break down their experience into easy blocks of information.

F= Frequency, how often they use the service (or at least how often they try to achieve their goal)

A= Actions, What steps do they take to achieve their goal. With this you can already begin building your customer journey map. I will often get out the post-it! notes and have the user walk me through each step.

T=Time, this can include, what time of day and also how long from start to finish

I= Intensity, How would they describe the emotional aspects of the experience. I only use their language and not mine, this is not a data decoding stage but a data collecting stage.

As a tip. Ask if they can SHOW you how they do it and not from their memory, our memories can be very unreliable and therefore making your data collection not very accurate and potentially a waste of time and money.

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven

A is for ALTERNATIVES

Everyone has alternatives, what you think are there alternatives and what they think might bring up some real surprises. We often forget that one of those is to NOT do the goal at all.

To better understand a persons alternatives is to break it down into past and future. "How did you achieve this goal in the past?" "What made you change to this service provider?" "What other service providers are you aware of out there?" "Have you considered them?" "What is the difference between them?" "Have you considered changing? Which one?" etc.

You could say this is great for benchmarking but, oftentimes we do benchmarking ourselves without the customers involvement, and that's ok. But then going out and speaking with your customers will add a really valuable layer to your understanding.

Tip. I've seen a lot of companies do this part through surveys, that's ok, it's quicker, might be cheaper, but often not very deep. The company might list the competitors and ask you to tick which ones you are familiar with... If you've ever done surveys yourself, you know that some of those brands you had forgotten about until they reminded you. The other issue with these is that your competitors are basically doing the same surveys so they have the same data = no advantage. If you're looking for unique insights, i.e. ones your competitors don't have, then taking the time to get out of the office and observe and speak with your customers is the way to go.

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven

M is for MEANING

The heart of it all, the big WHY, their MOTIVATION. (This is often my clients marketing campaign).

There are different layers and lots of ways to decode their meaning. The reality is I have seen too many cases where people guess it based on their own biases and interpretations instead of actually asking the users directly.

If you have established a good rapport/relationship with the person you are interviewing and collected a lot of data on how they achieve the GOAL etc. then they will be ready to talk about their MOTIVES. For this we ask two simple questions.

"What do you gain by achieving this goal?" and "What do lose if you don't achieve this goal?" Ok the exact words can vary, the key here is to understand the technique. It's referred to as the Cartesian Question, (see video for the history lesson).

We break down question 1 into 2 positive parts. GAIN + ACHIEVING. We do the same in the second question, but this time in negative form. LOSE + NOT ACHIEVING. Now, what you will often see and hear when you ask the second question is, they will take a deep breath and tell you a really meaningful story. (This is what you have been searching for). Now, if they answer  the same in question two as they did in question one then we haven't been successful (yet), there are lots of techniques to use and a little hard to write and easier to show. The easiest one is to simply PAUSE, remain silent, count in your head to five if need be, and you will be surprised and how often they then open up. Another strategy is to rephrase the second question. Essentially you are looking for information that is not copy paste their goal but more conceptual.

e.g. Someone says they want to give up smoking and say they GAIN: Save money and health, (pretty superficial), then on the LOSE they say, money and health, you pause, they take a deep breath and look down and begin talking about their son who likes football, they want to see them grow up, see what they become and do with their lives, they want to be a role model for them instead of sick, they fear dying painfully etc. You could build a campaign out of any of these details.

Remember, "It's not what they drive that counts, but what drives them!"

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven

It's been said that to uncover insights you should ask WHY 5 times. Here I explain WHY that is wrong, more likely to send you down the wrong path and WHAT is the answer.

If you've watched the video then you'll know how easy such a small shift in language can play in how we gain insights!

S is for SOLUTIONS

There is an old idea that we should ask people to come up with solutions and maybe you heard quotes about, "Customers don't know what they want."

Well, Even though I think it's good to do concretion sessions, there is a lot to learn about your customers by doing so. I would also support the idea that most customers don't know what they want, but they all know what they DON'T want!

SOLUTIONS is NOT asking them to solve their own problems, it is actually a way to understand their pains, frustrations or hurdles but structured in order of most painful first etc. It's a simple task, often overlooked and is a real asset when evaluating which improvements need to worked on and rolled out first.

Tip. When the list is done, consider asking the customer/user, "how does improving (Painpoint 1) help you better achieve your goals? etc. Sometimes it's obvious but if it isn't 100% clear then it might be worth asking.

Another tip is to consider transferring this data to a Kano Analysis, it will make internal communication more effective.

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven

By now you should be able to interview anyone whether it be a potential client, customer or user.

So here I'm going to share with you a way of choosing who to interview for your next project.

Here is a quick demo to see how the GRAMS method can be used in an improvised interview without any prepared script.

Equipment: Audio recorder, (mobile phone is usually good enough), Video (optional, great when observing the person in context).

Introduction: Talk about the brief/purpose of the interview, remind them that they can stop the interview at any moment. Important to talk about what will happen to the data you have collected. How stored, who has access, identifiable information about them will be removed. and when will it be deleted.

To accelerate rapport, focus on matching and mirror the following;

Visual: Eye movements, staring or avoidant etc.

Audio: Volume and pace.

Kinaesthetic: Body posture, arm waving and hand gestures.

The contents of the course are copyright © 2019 Gary van Broekhoven