Innovation Within

Innovation Within

Innovation Within

The Importance of Recording Customer Interviews

How do you add the voice of the customer to your business model validation?
Record it!

Recording customer interviews is essential for business model validation and innovation. It allows you to focus on the conversation and provides a high-fidelity record of the discussion. It also allows you to take fewer notes and transcribe the conversation, helping you gain valuable insights and achieve product/market fit.

Why?​

In the world of innovation and entrepreneurship, one key component is the process of customer discovery. This process involves engaging with potential customers to learn about their needs, wants, and pain points, and using this information to create a product or service that meets their needs. A critical part of this process is recording customer interviews, which can help you reflect on your interviewing skills, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, and quickly develop your skills.

Recording customer interviews allows you to focus on the conversation with the customer, rather than on taking notes. We all know that attention suffers when you are taking notes. When you record the interview, you are free to focus on the discussion without the distraction of capturing it. This results in a higher quality conversation that is more likely to provide valuable insights.

Moreover, recording interviews provides a much higher fidelity artifact of the conversation. Face it, no matter how good your notes are, they’ll never capture every word, intonation, and subtlety of a human conversation. By recording the interview, you have a permanent record of the conversation that you can revisit and analyze at any time.

Recording interviews also allows you to reflect on the conversation at a later date. Have you ever watched a movie a second time and gotten a new level of understanding that you initially missed? The same is true of listening to conversations with your customers. We miss things in the moment; we’re thinking about our next question, analyzing what’s being said. There’s a lot going on that can be missed, and unless you record it, you won’t know what important information you’ve lost.

When the conversation is being recorded, you can focus your note-taking on the insights you gain, instead of trying to capture the content. This allows you to take fewer notes and relax, knowing that nothing is being lost.

Finally, recording interviews allows you to transcribe the conversation in the Discovery Platform™, a powerful tool for lean startups and business model validation. Our SmartTranscript™ technology synchronizes the text of the transcript with the audio at the word level. This allows you to search and navigate the audio via the textual transcript. If you’ve ever tried to review an audio conversation using a slider to navigate the playback location, you’ll appreciate the value of simply searching for a keyword, selecting the text, and hearing exactly what was said. The combination of having text and audio synchronized together makes audio review of interviews much faster and easier.

Recording customer interviews is a critical component of the customer discovery process. By focusing on the conversation, creating a high-fidelity artifact, reflecting on the conversation at a later date, taking fewer notes, and transcribing the conversation, you can gain valuable insights that can help you achieve product/market fit and succeed in the competitive world of innovation and entrepreneurship.

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