10 Great Questions Product Managers Should Ask Customers

 

Jim Semick

A few well-phrased questions can yield fantastic customer insights. But knowing the right questions to ask during customer conversations and win-loss interviews takes a lot of practice and a healthy dose of curiosity.

Here are ten open-ended customer interview questions I have in my arsenal that have worked well for me over the years when engaging with prospects and customers on products including ProductPlan. Asking a few of these questions can make a difference in the features you decide to include on your product roadmap.

1. Why?

This is by far the most powerful question you can ask, so ask it often. Product managers should rarely accept a customer’s initial response; promptly moving onto the next point without pressing further can cheat your own understanding. By asking “why” as a follow-up question you can often extract a more enlightening response and get to the crux of their issue. For example, when I interviewed people about the product concept that became Citrix GoToMyPC we spent less time talking about remote access features and more time asking why their life would be better with our solution. As a result, we uncovered a stronger value proposition for the product.

2. How do you do that today?

This is a great question when a customer asks you for a specific feature. Rather than taking their feature request at face value, dig in to really understand how they are accomplishing the job today. If you can, have them show you their process or how they are using their current product. This line of questioning proved particularly useful for ProductPlan when we interviewed product managers to understand how they were building and communicating their product roadmap.

3. How do you know you’ve had a successful year/month/day?

This is a valuable question for business products where you are trying to uncover metrics and customer goals. If your product can help your customers achieve their goals or help make them more successful, you are well on your way to a valuable product.

4. How do you feel about your current solution?

This one is good for understanding opportunities to differentiate your product from competitors, especially during win-loss interviews. A good follow-up question might be “Where does your current solution provide the most benefit? What do you like best about it?” These questions make it clear that you are searching for opportunities to understand the motivations behind their choice; not judge the chosen solution.

5. What is the most frustrating thing about your current solution?

This is a multi-purpose, open-ended question that you can use to open up the conversation flow and to discover pain points. If the solution you are validating doesn’t solve a real pain point, it might not be valuable enough for your target users.

6. What do you wish you could do that you can’t do today?

This is a variation on the “If you could wave a magic wand…” question asked by many product managers. I’ve found that questions like these work well for very specific features or use cases. Be careful about asking this question in too general a fashion or too early, as it can lead to ambiguous results or a blank stare.

7. How would your day/job/task be different if you had this?

I use variations of this question depending on the circumstances, but the objective is the same: understanding how your solution or feature solves a problem and what type of value a customer would place on solving that problem.

8. Can you give me an example?

This is another great general-purpose question that can give you a goldmine of supporting evidence for your new product or feature. In customer interviews, especially for early-stage market validation, it can be easy for conversations to stay high level. Asking for specific examples lets your interviewee know that you are willing to dive into the details, which will provide you with much more information than a higher-level discussion.

9. If this were available today, would you buy/use it?

This question in itself may not result in an accurate answer (and can often lead to false positives). It’s what you do after this question that counts: Ask this question and then be quiet. Listening to their response for 60 seconds can give you insight into their decision process and the value they place on your product or feature. Make sure to follow-up with detailed questions such as “Would you walk me through the purchase process?”

10. Why would you recommend our solution to others?

You can use variations of this “ultimate question” to gauge satisfaction with your solution and then ask follow-up questions.

Try a few of these questions with customers or prospects during your next interviews. Some are better suited for new product development, but most will work well for your ongoing feature validation and win-loss interviews. Of course, great questions aren’t worth much unless you listen closely, read between the lines and then ask deeper follow-up questions.

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The Most Hated Brand in Countries Around the World

 What brand do people complain about most in different countries around the world?

To find out, Merchant Machine evaluated tweets containing brand names for positive or negative tones using an AI sentiment analysis tool.

The researchers then determined the most hated brand for many countries based on the highest proportion of negative tweets.

An infographic (below) presents the findings of the analysis.

https://cutt.ly/R5GNMSJ

10 Lessons We Learned About Telling Customer Stories

NADIA BASIL

Does anyone really want to read another success story about how a software company changed a customer’s life?

But testimonials, case studies, and customer success stories are ubiquitous across industries. Everywhere you look, companies are investing in written testimonials and marketing videos to showcase how much better off a customer is after finding their product.

Surely there has to be value in sharing them.

Why bother telling customer success stories?

A few months ago, we began focusing on our customer stories. While attending industry conferences and hosting small in-person events, we’d heard interest from customers in learning about how other customers were using Help Scout. We were also hearing from customers about new ways they were using the product that we hadn’t evangelized before — like how their team was transitioning from a shared email inbox to a multiple mailbox approach, or was working with Zapier in creative ways to connect to other productivity tools like Asana.

While companies have marketing teams behind their websites, stories from the actual folks who are using the products bring these messages to light in a different way than traditional copy. “Customer stories help our prospects with three distinct things,” says Tim Thyne, Head of Sales and Partnerships at Help Scout.

In “Use Stories from Customers to Highlight Your Company’s Purpose,” Harvard Business Review’s Erica Keswin shares that these 

customer success stories can ultimately become part of your company’s mission statement 

:

“Stories make us all pay closer attention to what matters. Start paying attention to the stories unfolding in your organization, and figure out how to help the best ones spread. Because people have a lot to say, and if we’re smart, we’ll start listening.”

So the question of whether or not to tell customer success stories is solved: you should. Now — how do you move it from “See how we stay SaaS-y” to something people actually want to read?

10 lessons for telling customer success stories

Here’s what I’ve learned about how to tell a compelling customer story.

1. It’s not about you

Approaching the project of telling customer stories, I thought I was coming at it from the right angle. It was simple, really: Anyone who was reading these stories wanted to know how Help Scout could change their lives, too, right?

I prepared a set of questions that would serve as a guide through the interviews, such as:

• How do you use Help Scout’s workflows?
• What are your favorite features — @mentions, Tags, etc.?

But after a second look at how a few of the stories were shaping up, it was clear that approach wasn’t working. What was so wrong with it?

It’s that my toolkit was inherently biased. I was using these probing questions as a way to get answers out of customers quickly — I was grateful for their time and didn’t want to waste it — but the reality was, I was injecting my point of view by asking these types of questions.

While the solution and how the tool is used is definitely helpful — not talking about how the product is used at all isn’t helpful for anyone — 

when telling stories, there has to be a bigger focus on the customer 

.

2. Start with the customer’s mission

Instead of following customer problem + your solution = success story, 

think about how your company’s solution fits with the customer’s mission 

. Yes, this means the onus is on you to learn more about your customers.

A few questions to consider as you get started:

• What about this particular company’s background attracted them to Help Scout?
• What would perfect customer support look like?
• How can you draw a parallel in your company’s mission and the customer’s?

Take BeerMenus, for example: They help people find beers and browse menus for beer stores, restaurants and bars nearby. But aside from the functional elements, the company credits its success to doubling down on their core values: respect for small business owners and all customers, and, of course, love of beer. Our goal was to make sure these ideas were elevated in the opening of their story.

10 Lessons We Learned About Telling Customer Stories

3. Take thorough notes before developing themes

When a customer tells you their story, avoid the temptation to simultaneously create the story’s framework. Instead, concentrate first on meticulous note-taking. Then, for the second round, go through, pull the key themes, and see where the supporting facts fit.

If you’re trying to create the framework and final story as the customer is speaking, there’s the potential to exclude an “add on” item that the customer could later delve into — all because you’re focused on the framework in your mind, and subsequently modeling a story based on your ideal instead of the customer’s true story.

Hiten Shah, Co-Founder at Quick Sprout, shares how he approaches customer research interviews: 

Take thorough notes during the customer interview, then find the core themes within your notes. 

“It’s better to finish all the interviews before analyzing them. Why? By separating the interviewing and the analysis, you avoid spreading yourself too thin between two different tasks. And when you try to analyze what you hear while doing the interviews, it’s another way to introduce bias into your learnings. You also give yourself time to step away and let your mind subconsciously process the interviews, which will give you better results when you start analyzing later.”

4. Don’t throw out all templates just yet

While including features in your questions sometimes injects your own bias, that doesn’t mean you should toss out using an organizational template altogether.

After taking notes and identifying key themes from your interview with the customer, an outline is a great way to organize your content before editing, while still giving room to identify any areas that you’d like to follow up on and quickly see if there are any areas that are repetitive.

• Background — what’s the company mission?
• What does ideal customer support or customer service mean to you?
• How is Help Scout used?
• Any standout features or integrations?

5. Be comfortable with (some) silence

No, not to the point where you think a call has dropped — but remember that it might take a minute or two to remember the highlights they’ve had with your product.

Avoid filling the void with suggestions of what other customers have said — give them space to think it through! I made a personal note to do more of this during customer story writing. (And dating. But that’s for a different blog post.)

One of the biggest highlights of your piece might come as a comment about a previous thought. Listen for these details, and wait for them to form. When I was interviewing Director of Marketing and Business Development Diana Murray at ASAP Accounting and Payroll, for example, she started talking about Help Scout’s Saved Replies feature:

“The Saved Replies feature is really key in our world. We’re dealing with explaining very complex information like payroll data, or wage requirements, or laws.”

But then she turned to Docs:

“...and in addition to Saved Replies, the Help Center, ASAP’s Knowledge Base, has also been a huge time saver when communicating information repetitively. We currently store and update over 250 articles, from best practices articles, to new client transition, and general business resources.”

… which became a story about how both features have helped all areas of ASAP’s business succeed:

“We’ve gotten traffic from some of these best practice articles in search engines, which has led users back to our site. Having Help Scout has definitely had a ripple effect for us to succeed in all areas of our business.”

6. Complement written stories with visuals

Once the narrative is complete, see how else you can bring these stories to life, whether it’s imagery, supporting infographics, or video. If you don’t have an in-house team, video agencies and video production firms can team up with you to bring the customer story to life. (We love collaborating on marketing videos with Boston-based Video Pilgrim — in them, we’ve found an incredible partner who understands our company mission and can draw that out on film).

10 Lessons We Learned About Telling Customer Stories

If video isn’t an option, there’s still a ton you can do to humanize your success stories through photography and visuals. Content marketer Jeff Bullas shares that you should publish images and photos as part of marketing tactics — and that articles with images will get 94 percent more total views.

Here’s the shot list template we love to use whenever we’re sourcing the photography session, or as a guide when requesting photos from our customer:

2-4 posed portrait + landscape style images of the interviewee(s)

2-4 images of the interviewee(s) at work

2-3 shots of the interviewee(s) with their team

7. Follow up about specifics and metrics

Once you’ve nailed the elements of the piece — the top features the customer is addressing and the solutions they provide — you can start digging into where you need to follow up for more information. Coupling qualitative statements with metrics make them that much stronger.

Of course, the customer’s time is precious, so it’s great to do these in a single email or follow-up call. For example, during our customer calls with OnePageCRM and NW Maids, one of the recurring themes was that using Help Scout has made their teams more productive. The follow-up emails helped us assign quantitative metrics:

8. Keep content that didn’t make it into the story

At the start of every customer story, we feature a header image and quote, which can later be used as social promotion.

There’s also quite a bit of content and strong testimonials that might not make it to the customer story. Trying to cram everything into a story isn’t helpful — it becomes a laundry list of feature highlights with no narrative arc, and that’s dry to read. But don’t dismiss all that extra content altogether.

Change the framework from “oh-look-at-all-this-excess-copy” to “let’s-do-something-with-this-copy,” and extract more value from content you’ve already produced by experimenting with customer story promotion.

For our customer story on Threadless, we found more ways to share beyond the written testimonial, each highlighting different angles, like how to set up automated workflows to assign conversations:

9. Share customer stories with current customers

Customer case studies are great for potential customers who are looking through your site and curious to see how your product is being used. But there’s another audience who might not be leveraging the product the same way and could benefit from learning new use cases: your current customers.

We include snippets of customer stories in our monthly release notes, coupled with a link to an article on our Docs site, so we can share company backgrounds and use cases and provide additional information for folks who want to try and execute the same on their own.

10. Be grateful that this is part of your job

Hearing time and time again about how much your company is making a difference to people all over the world? It doesn’t get better than that.

So be generous with gratitude. These folks are taking the time out of their day to talk to you about how much they love your company. You get to showcase it to the world. And that’s pretty awesome.

Better Website Testing: Five Steps To Knowing What To Test

Website testing can help you figure out what’s actually converting, and what’s not, on your landing pages.

You spend all that time and effort optimizing and managing your PPC AdWords campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your site and landing pages, so take advantage and optimize for the conversion, too.

By testing out all the various parts of your website and landing pages you can end up with a well-designed and intentional converting machine, which can help you increase your business ROI.

We’ve partnered up with VWO to bring you these five website testing ideas so you can you start to optimize your landing pages today.

Set Your Optimization Goals

You’ve got a long list of things you want to test out and need to start attacking the items on the list, in order to optimize your landing pages.

Wondering what to test first?

Set your optimization goals and figure out which order to test your various components. There’s a handful of prioritization frameworks out there to choose from. Here are four of them:

1. PIE – Potential, Importance, Ease

This one’s pretty popular and measures: how much improvement can be made (potential), how valuable traffic is (importance), and how complex the testing will be (ease).

2. ICE – Impact, Confidence, Ease

There’s two ICE frameworks. This one helps you prioritize what to test first by: measuring the impact of the test (impact), confidence level in the test working (confidence), and how easy the test is to implement (ease).

3. ICE – Impact, Cost, Effort

The second ICE framework helps you prioritize by: measuring growth and company benefits (impact), determining the cost of implementing (cost), and understanding the amount of resources required to test (effort).

4. PXL – ConversionXL’s framework

Our friends at ConversionXL came up with their own prioritization framework, where they make the potential, impact and ease of implementation categories more objective.

By prioritizing your optimization tests, you can have a better idea of which optimization goals you want to test for and reach first.

Remember to match up your optimization goals with your overall business and revenue goals.

Improved click through rates and conversion rates can be beneficial but only if they contribute to improved revenue streams.

If the optimization process isn’t going to make you more money in the end, then  you may have missed the mark.

Identify What to Test

Drumming up a list of which items to test can be a tricky part of the process. This takes place even before prioritizing your test list.

VWO recommends testing out almost anything on your website that affects visitor behavior.

Here’s their recommended list of 12 things to test out:

1. Headlines – Is your headline explicit and clear?
2. Sub headers – Does your sub header further support your unique value proposition?
3. Body copy – How’s the paragraph text readability?
4. Testimonials – Are your testimonials accurate and realistic?
5. Call-to-action (CTA) copy – Does the CTA threat level match your audience intent?
6. Links – Are you shooting for a 1:1 attention ratio?
7. Images – Does your hero shot portray your offer benefit being used?
8. Content near the fold – Which is the best landing page length for your offer?
9. Social proof – Are your social proof numbers high enough to publish?
10. Media mentions – Does inclusion of media mentions build or hurt your credibility?
11. Awards and badges – By including awards and badges are you building trust?

There are numerous other things to test for to improve your conversion rates. For more ideas on usability testing, check out 27 usability testing tips to help you win more conversions.

By combing through all the various parts of your landing pages and determining which pieces of the landing page anatomy to test, you can uncover some items with pretty significant improvement potential.

A/B Test Your Website

With A/B split testing you can isolate one factor at a time to see which of two variants accumulates more conversions.

Here’s an example of what an A/B split test can look like, where you have two variants testing for the same thing. In this case, Novica is testing for which email capture format is optimal:

By conducting the A/B split test, Novica was able to find out the email capture in Version A had an overall 67% lift in email submissions over Version B.

Definitely worth the testing effort…

VWO suggests following these six steps when A/B testing:

1. Study your website data – By analyzing metrics within your Google Analytics reports, you can uncover insights that can point you in the right decision-making direction.

For example, an attribution report like this can debunk your judgments about visitors coming in from your PPC display ads:

Although the display ads didn’t bring in direct conversions, they definitely played a hefty role in assisting with conversions. Now you can dig deeper into your reports and find out more specific trends.

Use these stats to figure out which parts of your site are high-performing and which aren’t converting as well. Then use those issue areas as testing topics to hypothesize areas of needed improvement.

2. Observe user behavior – Usability testing can help you find out how real people are actually interacting with your websites. By moderating in-person or recording a remote session, you can observe your participants’ behavior and look out for any major bottlenecks that might stand out.

You can observe user behavior using three usability testing methods: moderated in-person, moderated remote, and unmoderated remote. Here’s what a moderated in-person session looks like:

You can observe and record the session to analyze later – image source

3. Construct a hypothesis – After checking out your Google Analytics stats and observing your users, you can come up with more specific ideas to test. Maybe there are certain hypotheses that come up just by analyzing the data you’ve gathered thus far. Hypothesize on any glaring stats first.

4. Test your hypothesis – This is the stage where you implement your A/B testing and create variants for your subjects to test out. Find out if your hypotheses are true or not.

To calculate the appropriate test duration for your monthly visitors, current conversion rate, and expected change in conversion rate, you can use VWO’s Bayesian calculator.

5. Analyze test data and draw conclusions – Collect the results from your A/B testing and decipher what all that gathered data means. You should have a much clearer picture of which variant will optimize your landing pages and website.

We have a winner – image source

6. Report results to all concerned – Sharing is caring, especially when it comes to internal squad members so share your reports and findings with those that need to be in the loop.

When team members from your marketing, IT, UX, UI are all clued in, you’re likely to all be on the same page and ready to move forward as a collective group.

Multivariate Testing for Combination of Variations

Let’s say you have numerous items and combinations of each that you want to test, but it just won’t work with A/B split testing.

No worries, multivariate testing is the way to go. Here’s how VWO draws it out for us:

Testing for headline and image combos – image source

You can test out combinations of different items that you want to test, and you can test it in one session.

This can help you save time by knocking out various test items in one fell swoop. Just be sure your website testing process is calculated, intentional and fits into your optimization goal.

Split URL Testing for Heavier Variations

To test out more broad variations of your website you can use split URL testing.

With a split URL campaign you can test multiple versions of your website hosted on various URLs.

With VWO’s split URL testing feature, you can have two landing pages for your website hosted on two different URLs and split the traffic between the two to find out which one converts better.

Here’s an illustration of what that could look like:

Testing two landing pages on two different URLs – image source

You can take it a step further and set conversion goals for things that you want to track on your page.

Here’s how you set it up in VWO’s dashboard – GIF source

Tracking things like page visits, engagements on a page, form submissions, click on links or elements, revenue generation and even custom conversions, can help you optimize your specific URLs even more.

Closing Thoughts

Now that you’re up to speed with optimizing goals and knowing what to test, you can try out A/B testing, multivariate and split URL testing for yourself.

By sticking to your goal plan and conducting your testing process diligently from start to finish, you should have the highest converting version of your website and landing pages.

Now get optimizing so you can bring in that ROI…

Cynthia Meyer

Content Marketing Manager