Customer Interview Packages
Why Conduct Customer Interviews with Rivergate Marketing?
Keeping a pulse on how your company is perceived by your customers is invaluable to relationship management.
Learning where you are excelling and discovering where there is room for improvement in the eyes of your customers gives you the opportunity to improve those relationships and help your company grow.
Beyond relationship management, these in-depth interviews help you better understand your ideal buyer personas to inform your brand messaging and create compelling content which will resonate and appeal to the buyers you want to attract.
Rivergate Marketing is well-positioned to conduct these interviews. As a neutral third-party, the personal stakes are lower for your customer, allowing them to be more honest and transparent about their experience with your services/products and your team.
We know our way around the industry and speak their language for a more in-depth discussion.
What you do
- Send us the contact info for the person on the project you would like us to interview
- Give us the project title or brief description to reference
What we do
- Schedule a time with the customer
- Conduct an interview using neutral, open-ended questions about your team’s performance
- Report back with the answers
- If the feedback is positive, request to use quotes for a testimonial
Why
- Receive honest feedback about your project and team through a neutral third party
- Gather testimonials for your website and marketing materials
- Deepen your understanding of your customer relationships
- Refine your buyer personas to inform content strategy
For more on the benefits of conducting customer interviews, read our recent blog post
Frequently Asked Questions
The format is a relaxed conversational interview where we ask open-ended questions. We do not typically follow an exact set of questions, the nature of the interviewee’s responses will to some extent guide our questions. As the conversation flows we will vary our questions. Our goal is for the interviewee to dive in deep and give specific examples related to their answers, but everyone has a different comfort level and we understand that.
After many years of experience in conducting these interviews, we have an intuitive feel for how deep we can go and we are always mindful to prioritize keeping your customers’ level of comfort in mind at all times. We request the customer allocate 15 to 30 minutes time for the interview, but it is not unusual for the customer to give us 45 minutes to an hour of their time.
For a broad overview it typically flows like this after our introductions:
Setting the tone for a productive conversation:
We assure your customer that we have been working exclusively in the engineering and industrial automation industry since 2009 so we have a deep understanding of the technology and technical lingo which often puts them at ease to speak openly in their own engineering/technical language. This is important because we need to understand the language they use to describe projects, technologies, and the problems they have to inform buyer persona refinement and marketing messaging that will resonate with those customers.
Getting to know your customer:
- What is their role at their company and how did their career progress to their current role
- What are their challenges – what keeps them up at night
- How do they typically go about researching solutions
- Do they use social media such as LinkedIn? How do they use it?
Understanding the customer’s experience with your company:
- How long have they been working with your company and how did they originally find you – referral, Google search, LinkedIn, industry event, etc.
- What type of work do they use you for? Can they give an example of a recent project?
- What was the determining factor or factors when they chose to work with you?
- How do they feel about communication, project management, technical expertise, etc. on work performed – meet expectation, exceed, or needs improvement, and then we go deeper on why they responded one way or the other.
- Is there a particular technology or application expertise they value most about working with your company?
- How do they feel about using your company on future projects?
- Is there a service they would like you to offer that they do not think you offer currently?
- If you have worked with similar or competitive companies to yours, how would they compare them to the experience with your company?
- If a colleague asked about your company, what would they tell them?
Asking for a testimonial
When the customer experience has been a good one, we are typically able to obtain permission to use their positive feedback as testimonial quotes, which can be worth their weight in gold. We make that lift super easy for them to say yes by telling them we will form it for them based on their responses during the interview and then we email them for their approval.
After all interviews are completed you will receive:
- A summary documenting key insights collected.
- A full detailed debrief of all individual interviews via virtual meeting (Zoom, Teams, or another preferred method). This will be an interactive meeting to discuss and ask questions pertaining to the findings. Depending on the number and depth of interviews, the results may be presented over several meetings.
- A PDF summary and full transcription of all interviews and a testimonial quote if applicable. Other than the customer approved testimonial quotes, the transcriptions and summaries are strictly confidential and are solely for internal use of the company that hired Rivergate to conduct the interviews.
- Optional high quality soft-bound printed 8.5″ x 11″ booklets are available.
For more information, read our blog post, The Benefits of Conducting Customer Interviews.