In Chapter 5, The Interview Process – Preparation, we discussed developing a plan to do a VoC, how to leverage the resources within your organization, and the methods to engage with the customers outside your organization you wish to interview. Inside your organization, we made sure you had clear goals and plans as to why you are doing a VoC program, and how to gather the data to present to your management to justify the costs and resources. We also talked about how to create an interview team and how to select who should, and should not, be on the team, as well as how to develop an interview guide and structure the customer discussion. External to your organization, we discussed leveraging the customer segmentation you had done previously to select qualified customers to visit. Lastly, we reviewed scheduling the interviews with your customers and how to get them to buy in to the interview session.

In this chapter, we will take the next logical step and talk about the details of the actual interview. We will go beyond the topics covered in Chapter 5, The Interview Process – Preparation, as we dive into the various roles and responsibilities of the interview team. We will talk about how to assign the "best" people to these roles and discuss the responsibilities of each role within the interview. We will also spend a good amount of time on best practices as we talk about the various dos and don'ts when conducting customer interviews.