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Does anyone have questions they usually ask as part of a customer story interview? Open to suggestions. Also, any best practices for getting insight from the CSM/AE on the account. I feel like the last few I've done, they were like, "This would be great." And the customer was like, "No, that's not a thing." :woman-facepalming:
This is the guide I use for mine! I usually don't ask all of these questions word for word, but I think they're a good jumping off point
we have a super technical product so i use two different questionnaires, one for the interview and one for the technical team to fill out async. the interview questionnaire is pretty general (i modified from a template a PMM i know put together) but can be made more specific to your company, etc
My favorite question is "Tell me about the moment you realized [PRODUCT] was working...."
Thank you all! This is great. Appreciate the insights and resources.
Hi @Shannon Howard - I spend a good amount of time researching the customer and their journey before the interview. My goal is to sound as relatable as possible so they feel like talking to an extended member of their team.
On gathering insights, I start with the CRM that Sales maintains - why did they come to us, who were the buying committee, competitors evaluated, etc.
Then I approach the CSM. If it's a big account, there'll be QBR calls and Account plans with goals and business strategy. After reading these material and taking notes, I set up a 1:1 call with the CSM.
Recently, I started asking the CSMs, "What are the 2-3 things that he/she is super proud of?" (Eg: streamlining processes, correcting something that their predecessors messed up) and "What are the landmines I should not go near?" (Eg: I interviewed a happy customer whose initial implementation with us was bad and the CSM turned the sentiment around. So if I bring implementation experience as a question, probably his/her mood will completely change and ruin the interview). I also inquire their repeated feature requests that are still unmet - so I can steer away from that.
Does it help? Happy to chat 1:1 and deep-dive - i love this topic!
I also love @Audrey Zigmond 's suggestion of the impact or A-ha! Moment. I made this part of my questionnaire recently and am seeing some great responses.
@Harikrishna P This is awesome. When it comes to our documentation around things, we are pretty immature, so I think your suggestion of meeting & asking those questions is exactly where I need to go.
@Shannon Howard I spent time doing customer research for GTM strategies and aggregated the techniques and tools we used (compiled from thousands of interviews by my fellow consultants and Forrester analysts) including neurolinguistic techniques that can be applied to any question, along with lots of other guidelines into this document:
@Shannon Howard thanks for asking this—it's a great question!
If I can piggy-back off of this excellent discussion: do people have questions that they like to ask for customer interviews that are not case-studies? I'm working on a customer feature program and I want to do as much as possible to make these interviews authentic features of our users, and create distance between these and our formal case study program (e.g. no talk about ROI or performance improvement, no hero narrative for our product)