The role of the listener/note taker is about being the archivist of the meeting more than anything else. Their role is to capture all the salient points and customer responses to the questions being asked by the moderator. They must also be able to not only write verbatim what the customer says during their response, but must also be able to capture the customer's most critical priorities and the emotional nuances that the customer expresses in the tone of their voice or cadence of their response.

The listener/note taker's role is not to help moderate the questions, but often the note taker may need to ask for clarification or elaboration to make sure that the question is fully answered and documented so as to perform the later analysis.

The note taker must also be sure to take notes in such a way that it is easy to digest the most salient points of the interview immediately after the interview is complete, as well as have the ability to pull specific questions' responses from multiple interviews when all the interviews are complete. Again, try following one of the methods discussed previously by leaving lots of white space either between the questions or to the right of the questions so it will be easy to assemble all the responses to any given question after the interviews are complete.

The note taker must also keep track of which of the key questions have been asked and answered, and which ones have not. If the customer ends up "leading" part of the interview, then the questions will likely be discussed out of order and the moderator may not be fully aware of which ones have been addressed. Often, it will be your job toward the end of the interview to inform the moderator which key questions are still open and awaiting a response from the customer.

You may ask, "Why do I need to take notes if I am recording the interviews?" The rationale is driven by post-interview analysis. It is much easier to try and compare how a customer responded to a particular question when it is all in written form and categorized based on the question being asked. If all you had was a recorded record of the interviews, it would be a very labor-intensive process to review as many as 30 recordings to see how each customer answered Question 15. If you have a written record of each interview and have all the answers categorized by question, it is a very easy and efficient process to analyze 30 different respondents and perform some rudimentary analysis across the sample population. It is a simple clerical task to create detailed reports by simply cutting, copying, and pasting each interview answer to the appropriate question.

Even if you pay for a transcription service (which will end up being very expensive), you will have a much larger amount of text to wade through and still will not have the answers categorized with their respective questions. The best way to document the interview is to use your written or typed notes as the basis for your post-survey analysis and use the recording to go back and review the rich content when you need to understand in more detail the nuances of how the question was being answered.