Customer Interview Questions to Conduct Market Research (Download PDF)
February 22, 2022
How do you determine if you have customers who will positively impact your product, relationships, and overall growth?
Do you know the people who are actually valuable to your brand?
2022 consumers face thousands of daily choices every single day. New products, new features, more bang for your buck…making each of those decisions takes its toll. This intensely competitive market justifies why tech companies are often too involved in investing in new technologies, products, and services.
While adding value to the consumer and aiming to capture a bigger market share isn’t a bad idea, risking missing out on the consumer journey, their needs, and wants can result in big opportunities being wasted.
Jump to the market research template.
Why Conduct Market Research?
There are three core stages critical to tech providers’ success – acquiring customers, retaining customers, and monetizing customers.
Companies who can determine:
- The most compelling reasons why their buyers decided to invest in their solution.
- The results they expect to achieve.
- The risks involved they understand with achieving the results.
- The concerns that cause your buyer to believe that your solution is not their best option.
- The surrounding influences to make a decision, as buyers rarely make them in isolation.
- The emotions and motivations behind making the buying decision.
Can create experience-driven marketing associated with guaranteed customer success.
You want to hear your buyer’s story and get into their heads. It clearly reveals the decision you need to influence showing you exactly how, when and why buyers engage to choose your solution, your competitors’, or stick with what they have.
The better the market research, the more dramatic the insights, and the more laser-focused targeting messaging, positioning, and value proposition are.
The Four Common Types of Market Research
There are multiple ways to conduct market research and collect customer data, test products, and do brand research, but the four most common are:
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Observation
- Interviews
1- Surveys
A form of qualitative research with open or closed-ended questions.
2- Focus groups
These offer deeper insight into the products’ customer experience and what marketing messages really resonate with them.
3- Observation
It has no predefined set of questions, so the challenge here is that you can’t get direct feedback from the user. It’s best when combined with interviews, surveys, and/or focus groups.
4- Interviews
Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions (in-person/ virtual), an excellent way for more natural conversations and deeper insights.
It is no secret that the deeper you dive into the problem, the clearer the solution becomes. But what better way to get into your ideal customer’s head, understand their pain points and needs, get inspiration for product development, learn their vocabulary, and even identify new target audiences than a one-on-one, real-time conversation with them!
You might not be able to directly tune into your customer’s brains. But with the right kind of interview, you can get the next best thing.
What is a Market Research Template?
To build a great product, you have to understand the market you’re targeting deeply. Otherwise, you could end up with a brilliant product that nobody wants. That’s where the market research template comes in, also known as a market study template. It can be a market research report template, market research survey template, market research excel template, or even a customer interview checklist.
It is a pre-built set of questions that will help you identify exactly who your buyers are, what they want, where they usually look for products, and how much they are willing to pay. Learn how you can get the market research template in action with our guide to B2B market research.
Market Research Template for Beginners
To help remove the complexity of the task and empower you to get more from your data, we’ve created a Customer Interview Questions Checklist.
Get started on your market research journey with our free interview tool with 21 open-ended questions so you can make the most of customer interviews. The meaty responses that these questions can provide will help you identify what is and is not working with your product for future improvements.
Download The Customer Interview Questions Checklist for Conducting Market Research