Why do customers struggle to accurately describe their own behavior? What’s the most effective way to conduct customer interviews?
Teresa Torres’s customer interview methodology, detailed in her book Continuous Discovery Habits, offers a practical approach to understanding customer needs. Her story-based interviewing technique helps product teams gather authentic insights by focusing on specific experiences rather than general feedback.
Keep reading to learn how Torres’s approach to customer interviews can transform your product discovery process and lead to better outcomes for your business.
Teresa Torres on Customer Interviews
According to Teresa Torres, customer interviews are an integral part of the continual product discovery process. She explains that, without discovery practices, companies will be unable to keep up with customer needs and desires. Therefore, to maintain a practice of ongoing discovery, companies should interview customers no less than once a week.
However, a challenge with customer interviews is that customers usually aren’t very good at describing their own behavior. Their thinking is constrained by cognitive biases and a lack of understanding of what could be different. For example, a customer might say they base their decisions about which laptop to buy based on how much memory it has, but in reality, the computer’s appearance may have a greater impact on their purchasing habits.
(Shortform note: In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely expands on the idea that customers aren’t very good at describing their own behavior. He argues that we have two selves that drive our decisions: one that’s in a “cool state” that can make decisions rationally, and another that’s in an emotionally aroused state, which leads us to make less rational decisions. When we’re in a cool state, we’re generally unable to predict how we’ll feel in a future emotionally aroused state—like the emotionally aroused state we’re in when we shop. Checking in frequently—or weekly, as Torres recommends—with customers can help bridge that gap between decision-making states.)
Story-Based Interviewing
Because of the difficulties customers have in describing their behavior, Torres advocates story-based interviewing rather than asking direct questions about behavior. This involves asking customers to share specific, recent experiences rather than general observations. For example, instead of asking them what features they look for in a new laptop, ask them to describe the last time they bought a new laptop. As they describe it, dig into their story further with timeline-based questions, such as prompting them to start at the beginning, then asking what happened next, and so on.
Once you’ve gathered all this information, have your three-person product development team reflect on it and draw conclusions about customer needs and wants. From there, determine what problems you want to address and what end goal you want to achieve. This will lead you to your next step: brainstorming solutions.
| The Drawbacks of Story-Based Interviewing While story-based interviewing can help you get a clearer picture of a customer’s experience, it may still be subject to biases or errors. People may demonstrate memory biases or distortions—the recency bias can cause customers to primarily remember experiences that happened more recently, for example. The choice-supportive bias might lead them to overemphasize aspects of their experience that were the result of choices they made rather than aspects that happened to them without their choosing. Episodic memory (the memory of experiences we’ve had) is also especially prone to distortion, meaning that customers’ recalling of events may not always be accurate. You may find it beneficial to devise other means of gathering information on customer needs and wants to inform your product development. For example, some experts recommend gathering feedback from customers immediately after providing them with a service, which could prevent the memory distortions that happen over time from affecting their input. |
Exercise
Following Torres’s story-based interviewing approach, write three specific questions you could ask customers to learn about their experiences using your product or a similar one. Remember to focus on recent, specific experiences rather than general observations.
