How we interviewed the first users and what came out of it

There is nothing more important in business than understanding the customer and his needs. Sam Sam Walton in his book Made in America. As I created Wal-Mart, I said that a deep understanding of the client and its needs is the key to a successful business. We learned this from our own experience when communicating with clients in Teamdesk .




About 7 years ago, when I created the first Internet projects, I didn’t even think about my audience - people for me were faceless traffic and just numbers. A thousand more, a thousand less — it didn't matter. I didn’t care who these people were; then it seemed irrelevant. I realized the depth of my delusions only by working on my first b2b company: for several months we had unsuccessfully fought over the search for channels to attract customers. But how to attract them, if you do not know anything about them?
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Then someone from above took pity on me and sent a book by Steve Blank about Customer Development. Only then did I realize that I knew absolutely nothing about our clients. At that moment, in order to move forward, we had to take a step back. Then, in order to correct this misunderstanding, I traveled around clients and conducted interviews, talked to managers, sat behind the back of the staff and watched how they work in the system. It was what you need.

Wise with gray hair of previous experience, in Teamdesk we immediately set ourselves the task of finding out as early as possible and as much as possible about our customers. Despite the fact that I understand the subject area quite well, neither I nor my partner knew anything about our target audience. Who uses the ticket system? How many people are usually in support? What functionality is needed first? We had only hypotheses. We only had to answer all these questions.

What we are interested to know about customers?

We needed to somehow structure our knowledge about clients, so we sat down and together with the guys we identified the main groups of information. We wanted to know everything (or almost all) about the users of our Help Desk system. Of course, the maiden name of the head's mother will be superfluous, but at least we must clearly understand the following important points:

• General profile - what kind of company it is and what it does, where it is geographically located and how many employees it has in general, and in particular, the industry.
• Problems / pain - what a client has pain, what worries him and does not suit the current customer support process, why he came to us, what results he expects from the system.
• The decision maker, the budget holder and the end user - we are trying to understand who in the company makes the decision to purchase, who conditionally signs the account, who will then use the system. Somewhere it is one person, and somewhere 3 different.
• The decision-making process and the purchase process - we also try to understand how the system chooses the system inside the customer, who and how discusses the purchase, how the testing is done.
• One day in the life of a client - we want to know how our client spends his working day, what programs he uses, how much time he spends answering in the ticket system, what devices he uses for this.

Here in the aforementioned book of Steve Blanca in the Customer interview a total of more than 40 questions for customers. We have all simplified a little.

What did we ask?

When it became clear what information is needed, we formulated only 12 questions. Where it was possible, we tried not to ask too many questions, but to look for information in open sources. For example, if we know the domain and see a typical online store on it, then why ask something else, if it is clear that this is eCommerce. Here is the list:



In addition to the list of questions, we decided to look at the sites of competitors. Usually there are “our customers”, “for whom” or “success stories” sections. All this makes it possible to understand who is already using the ticket systems (albeit not ours yet). As a result, even before the survey, we had an idea about who we would communicate with.

We also formulated the following simple rules for conducting a survey:

• Always ask everyone the same questions. Once I tried to communicate with clients in the format of a free conversation and take notes on everything said. When more than 10 such interviews have accumulated, it turned out to be extremely difficult to draw practical conclusions - all information is scattered and poorly structured.
• In no case do not sell - there was a sin for us, when we gradually moved from questions to sales. Clients were closed and the dialogue did not work.
• We speak 20%, and we listen to 80%. Usually, after a brief introductory statement, we ask the first question and carefully listen and note the answer. Give talk to the maximum.
• If they talked for less than 10 minutes, the interview failed. People usually willingly share their problems and talk about their work. 10 minutes - at least.
• Preparing questionnaires with questions in advance. It is very convenient to simply take a sheet and write down a specific answer to the question. Then put such sheets in a pile and at once look at 20 answers to 1 question.

Well, there are questions, the first information was received, it was time to take on the phone / Skype and start communicating ...

How did we ask?

The first pancakes were lumpy - the dialogues did not stick, customers did not want to waste time and communicate. We were a little upset. Then they realized their mistake: it was necessary to prepare and rehearse the conversation script in advance and, most importantly, the conversation should not be intrusive and strain the client. Otherwise, the dialogue will not work, and the answers will be in the format of "Yes", "No", "I do not know."

Then we sat down and sketched the following script:

“Good afternoon, this is Nicholas from Teamdesk. Do you have a minute? ”- If the client gave an affirmative answer, then we continued.

- “I would like to consult with you on working with the ticket system. We conduct a small customer survey in order to better understand your tasks and needs. For us it is very important. It will take no more than 5 minutes. Do you mind? ”- The following questions followed the list. Sometimes we did not keep order.

Thus, we greatly increased customer responsiveness and decided 3 important points:

1. clarified whether it is convenient for the client to talk. If not, then they called back at the agreed time.
2. clearly defined the purpose of communication, people began to understand what they spend their time on.
3. marked the time frame in 5 minutes and showed the importance of this pig for us.
4. Personal meeting is certainly better, especially if you work with corporate clients. But we usually used phone or skype. The survey was conducted either immediately after the registration in the system, or when they saw that the user configured the system and actively uses it.

This is how one of our real questionnaire with brief notes-answers looked like (I will not, of course, call the company, all names are changed).



And the main question: when to stop the interview? Never! We will continue the interview and communication with clients. This process must be continuous, as the market may change, the product will change, new customer segments may appear.

How did we analyze the questionnaires and what conclusions did we draw?

When we have accumulated the first 10-15 profiles, we could already draw the first conclusions. Some of them confirmed our hypotheses by segment and by price, and some of the answers were given new insights.

We realized that some customers are not looking for the help desk for customer support, but for the service desk for automating internal IT services. These are not our clients, as they need a completely different functionality and they have everything differently: decision makers, budgets, etc. Probably, on our site it is not accurately described for whom and for what our system, perhaps people just do not know the difference between help desk for customer support and IT service desk. We'll figure out!

We also realized that many users feel comfortable paying 1000-1500 rubles / month. for 2-3 employees, this means that our hypotheses for the price and current rates have hit the mark. Sales will show how much. The hypothesis with the “Webmasters” segment was not justified. It has been suggested that they need a ticket system to support site visitors, but this is not the case. There is no interest (and therefore problems) for this.

Communicating with clients, we began to better understand what functionality they need right now, and what they can wait. As a result, we slightly adjusted our roadmap. Also, live communication with some clients allowed us to build long-term and friendly relations, and this is worth a lot.

Friends, I hope our experience was useful to you and will allow you to get to know your customers better. Subscribe to our blog on Megamind and ask questions in the comments.