<<< Previous Section: Designing interviews
Getting people to agree to and show up for an interview tends to be the hardest part of customer research.
It’s even harder with high churn or low product engagement.
Like a marketing or sales funnel, you’ll have an interview funnel.
You’ll reach out to a lot of people at the top of your funnel.
But only about 10-20% of those who enter will complete your funnel with a full, high-quality interview.
You only need 5 good interviews, which means you’ll need to reach out to 25-50 customers.
Common funnel steps:
Finding good interview candidates
When you’re looking at which customers to reach out to, you’ll have your research profile to match them to.
But there’s much more to a great interview candidate.
After matching their profile, you’ll want to look at:
Screening people
Sometimes you’ll have a factor in your interviewee profile that requires data you don’t have access to.
If you ask these folks for an interview right away, you’re going to end up with people who don’t match the profile. So you screen them first.
You do this by sending out an initial email that either asks a couple of questions or sends them to a short survey with 3-5 questions to clarify they match your profile.
You’ll then schedule the actual interview in a follow-up email if they match your profile.
There are pros and cons to screening. It ensures you have the right fit for your research, but adds another conversion step, which means fewer interview responses.
It can also feel a little cold, especially for small business customers.
Incentives
It’s common to include incentives like an Amazon gift card to increase the number of responses you get.
If you have a passionate user base, you may be able to get the number of interviews you need without incentives.
But keep in mind:
The most common incentives are cash and Amazon gift cards, but some companies will give donations to the interviewee’s favorite charity.
Types of incentives:
When figuring out how much to spend on the incentive, estimate the customer’s hourly wage based on their linkedin profile, apply it to the length of the interview and try to match it with the incentive.
For example, if you estimated a customer’s hourly wage to be $100 and your interview would be 30 minutes long, you’d offer a $50 Amazon gift certificate for completion of the interview.
Incentives should be sent as soon as possible after your interview to provide a good experience, and ideally not before as you can get no shows or people who want to leave early.