I've always felt that the heart of a good VoC is driven by face-to-face customer interviews. As we discussed earlier, these interviews can take the form of open-ended interviews that help a marketer define the needs of a next-generation product, or they can be a more structured interview that will help derive which specific functions and features need to go into a product. A feedback or user- experience interview where the customer can provide insight into product usability can also be used to help define the best launch strategies to deploy. Customer interviews are ranked very high (along with ethnography) in terms of their effectiveness, as shown in the Cooper and Dreher research, and are ranked number one in terms of popularity versus the other VoC research methods.

With this method, the product development teams visits current customers/users as well as potential customers/users to get a total view of the product requirement. In-depth interviews are conducted, driven by a pre-crafted interview guide to uncover user wants, needs, and problems with regard to the new potential product. This guide lays out the questions and topics and guarantees a level of consistency across the interviews, and is a repeatable method of recording customer responses.

Customers and customer sites are identified for potential interviews and an agreement is made to interview a small group of customer representatives, typically the key purchase influencers and users. The teams performing the interviews are typically two–three people with representatives from marketing and engineering (and occasionally sales). I find it is imperative that the engineering side of the organization is involved in this initiative as this greatly reduces the potential misinformation and lost information from second-hand discussions. The interviews are conducted using the interview guide, with a special emphasis on open-ended questions that address user needs, functions, and benefits with respect to their job or position and not just product features.

As the interview process is so critical for customer VoC, and there are so many ways to help ensure you have a successful customer visit interview, I have devoted the next two chapters, Chapter 5, The Interview Process – Preparation and Chapter 6, The Interview Process – the Interview, to outline the construction and execution of the interview process with a special focus on the Discovery phase.