Introduction: Customer Conversations

Learn how to talk to your customers and find what they need

Here are some tips on how to have the types of conversations with customers that will help you get what you need to test your ideas.

You most likely already are in conversations with your customers. Often these conversations are about Sales, Support, Marketing, or Research.

• Sales conversations involve discovering how your current product or service could meet the needs of customers.
• Support conversations involve helping your customers use, or get the most out of your product or service.
• Marketing conversations involve engaging people in the vision of what you are hoping them to achieve through the use of your product or service.
• Research conversations involve trying to understand new ways to serve customers. This is the area where deeper conversations can help.

Common research methods include surveys and focus groups. Each of which are helpful to gaining information about your customers needs. Surveys are helpful for getting the scale of a particular need. The social dynamics of a focus group can be helpful for understanding the normalisation of a need. In order to get the most out of these types of research methods, it is helpful identify the real customer needs that best emerge from deep conversations with individual customers. Then you can check these needs for scale (survey) and normalisation (focus group).

These deeper conversations help you explore the experience of your customers, to find the needs they actually have, that they may not have even been able to articulate.

Want to read more? Move on to Chapter 01 of the Hunch Playbook: How to have deeper customer conversations