These are the steps on how to recruit customers for customer interviews.

Speaking to customers and non-customers to understand their experience helps you come up with and test ideas, validate assumptions, identify risks, and collect customer stories. There are many reasons to do this, but the idea is that whenever you are wondering what, how, or why when making decisions, doing customer interviews allows you to come from a place of evidence, hearing what customers need straight from the horse’s mouth.

Recruiting customers

Recruiting is the first step. Don’t rely on or use any mass marketing user research agencies. We at listen + do have worked with market research and user recruitment agencies doing research on behalf of clients who use these types of customer recruitment agencies — and we’ve found those they recruit a bit ‘nuff’.

They recruit online, instantly reducing the pool of people to those who are typically on the social media platforms they’re recruiting from and who are digitally literate enough to navigate the platform (like registering as a user-tester). They promote it as a way for people to get paid, which leads to people treating it as a form of a quick buck — at times even lying about being a customer, ticking the boxes just to be part of the research and get paid.

Comparing users recruited through these agencies versus those recruited more traditionally, there’s an immediate reduction in the quality of people you’re talking to. This leads to skewed data and doing the research can end up being a complete waste of time. This is research — information you’re going to use to make decisions, sometimes about where you’re going to focus your strategy and spend money. You want genuine, quality customers (or potential customers) to talk to. This also means, most of the time, excluding family and friends.

Recruit for quality

Recruit for quality. Think about who is your customer, look at your current customers and customers you aren’t yet reaching. Remember: good business is accessible business. Who do you need to include?

Decide if you’re going to do the interviews 1:1 or in a group — or both. Think about where they will be most comfortable doing the interview, knowing that the more comfortable they are, the better the quality of your engagement will be.

In our experience, don’t always jump to paying for their time. Think about how you can genuinely bring them along your journey as a business — involve and include them. People value that and appreciate feeling valued. Remuneration is certainly a consideration, but customise your approach to this — not everyone expects to be paid, and if you just offer money as your go-to, you might miss out on other meaningful ways to connect with your customers. It can quickly become transactional.

Inviting customers

Once you’ve thought about these things, go invite them! Do it in a way that is personable — like giving them a call. We find this is where people get scared, thinking, why would someone do this? Our experience is that people enjoy giving their opinion and sharing their experience, especially if you are showing up as a business that genuinely cares about its customers and presents as a local, community-driven, friendly business (vs. your corporate ‘creeps’).

Pick up the phone and ask — respect their time. More often than not, you’ll find they say yes.

Consent and data collection

Once they say yes, it’s time to talk about consent. When writing consent forms, don’t jump to a “you own their story” vibe — this isn’t cool. Think about what you need their interview for. Default to them sharing their experience de-identified. It’s not often you need to record it under a name other than basic identifiers like age, location, etc. Send them forms for consent when booking in their customer interview times.

Once you have consent, get set up to record and store your data. We’ve written about this more here.