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Customer interviews are often rushed, or treated as a formality - this often results in surface-level answers that fail to provide meaningful insights. This guide is designed to change that. By taking a more proactive approach to customer interviews, you’ll be able to use them to get genuine, valuable information that will allow you to build a startup with a value proposition that customers want.
Understanding your audience is essential in the green-tech sector, as success hinges on the adoption of your innovations.
Green-tech products and services often involve new technologies that require customers to alter their processes or invest in an unfamiliar solution. Without a clear understanding of your audience’s needs, you’re at risk of creating an offering that’s not as useful as it could be - which can make it much harder to find customers.
Gaining customer insights through interviews can help you to shape your product in a way that resonates with your target market and drive adoption. For example, a green-tech startup offering sustainable building materials needs to understand how construction companies prioritise factors like cost, durability and regulatory compliance. A start-up in this space would conduct customer interviews with construction companies to ensure the product aligns with market expectations, making adoption much more likely.
This guide will show you how to leverage customer interviews as a tool to uncover the motivations behind your customers’ decisions - such as why they choose certain products or solutions, what drives their willingness to invest in new technologies and how they prioritise requirements. In doing this, you can refine your offering, articulate your value proposition with precision, and position your solution as a practical choice for your target audience.
It’s important to realise that the purpose of a customer interview isn’t to confirm that your solution is the right fit for that specific buyer, and eventually make a sale, but to deeply understand your target customer’s needs, challenges and priorities. There’s a time and a place for selling, but a customer interview isn’t it.
As Henry Ford, father of mass produced cars, (allegedly) said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”, highlighting the fact that customers may not know exactly what solution they need, but they do know their problems and frustrations. Like a patient describing symptoms to a doctor, your customer can share their challenges - it’s up to you to figure out how to best solve them.
By setting a goal early-on to focus on understanding your customer’s experience rather than selling to them, you’ll gain meaningful insights that inform your product and ensure you can make sales in the long-term.
Proper preparation is key for conducting an insightful customer interview. By organising your approach in advance, you can ensure the conversation is focused, effective and yields valuable insights. Here are some key steps you can take to prepare:
The “query effect” occurs when people form opinions on topics they wouldn’t normally care about, simply because they’re asked about them. As Jakob Nielesen from the Nielsen Norman Group explains:
"People can make up an opinion about anything, and they'll do so if asked. You can thus get users to comment at great length about something that doesn't matter, and which they wouldn't have given a second thought to if left to their own devices."
This effect often leads to unreliable insights, as responses are more about the act of questioning than true user behaviour, meaning, users may create an answer to appear helpful, or to align with what they believe the interviewer wants to hear.
For example, a green-tech startup developing an energy management system, may ask a customer if they would like a detailed dashboard showing real-time energy usage. While the customer may say yes to seem helpful or because the feature sounds like an interesting novelty, they might not actually use it, preferring simpler features like automated alerts. This creates a false impression of demand for the dashboard.
When conducting customer interviews, you should keep the query effect in mind. To do this, ensure your research isn’t too tightly framed around a single product or feature. You should start with broad questions to explore the user’s needs overall and prevent artificial responses.
Leading questions can introduce bias to your interviews, skewing the responses and creating inaccurate insights.
A question such as “In what ways does supplier sustainability matter to you?” assumes that sustainability is already an important factor to the customer, which may prompt them to overemphasise its importance in their response - even if it isn’t a major consideration in their decision-making process.
Instead, framing the question more neutrally, such as “How did you choose your suppliers?” removes any assumptions, allowing the customer to prioritise factors that truly matter to them.
Avoiding simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions can also help customers to form their own opinions. For example, when asking for feedback on a website an interviewer might ask “Does the website take too long to load?”. In this case, the customer is likely to say yes regardless of whether or not loading times have actually impacted their experience. This could lead to you putting time aside to solve a problem that isn’t actually affecting user satisfaction or engagement.
Instead, take a more open-ended approach by asking general questions like “What are your thoughts on our website?” or “How was your overall experience using the website?”. This allows respondents to naturally highlight aspects they found problematic or important. If loading times come up unprompted, it's a strong signal that the issue is genuine and impactful.
This approach helps you to uncover authentic insights and ensures the conversations remain unbiased, giving you a clearer picture of the customer’s genuine motivations.
Customers provide more reliable insights when discussing their past experiences, or things they dislike - as these give them an opportunity to talk about actual events, rather than speculating about the future.
Asking about future behaviour or hypothetical situations often leads to guesswork, where customers may unintentionally give inaccurate or overly optimistic responses.
For example, instead of asking “Would you buy a product that reduces emissions?” - which might prompt an easy “yes” without much thought - ask “How much money has your company spent on emission reduction last year?”, inviting them to share their real decision making process when it comes to emission reduction.
A customer’s experience can be much more useful than an opinion formed in the interview. Those who have agreed to be interviewed can often try too hard to be helpful. They may give answers that are intended to help the interviewer or present a positive image of themselves, but don't reflect their actual behaviour.
This is especially common in startups, where founders ask customers if they’d be interested in an innovative product. Customers may say yes to be polite or supportive, leading the startup to create that product - only to discover that those same customers aren’t interested enough to pay for, or adopt it. Focusing on past actions instead of hypothetical interests helps avoid this trap, ensuring your solution addresses real needs and problems.
Mastering the art of asking “Why?” is crucial because it goes beyond surface-level answers, helping you to uncover root causes or motivations behind a customer's decisions.
While open-ended questions like “What…?”, “When…?” and “How…?” are valuable for prompting detailed responses, the strategic use of “Why…?” can help you go beyond surface-level answers.
The “5 Whys” technique, developed by Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota Industries) in the 1930s, is a structured method for identifying the root cause of a problem or decision. By repeatedly asking “Why?” (typically up to 5 times), you move past symptoms and uncover the underlying issues or motivations that drive behaviour.
For example:
By the fifth “Why?” you should have a clear understanding of the customer’s decision-making process and motivations. This removes the guesswork from customer interviewing and gives the customer a chance to reveal what they might not consciously recognise.
Starting customer interviews with broad, personal questions creates a relaxed atmosphere, builds trust and provides valuable context for understanding their responses.
Examples of conversation starters include “Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your background?” and “What does a typical day look like for you?”.
Asking questions like these puts the customer at ease, by starting off with familiar, non-intimidating questions and helps to establish a natural flow to the conversation.
Understanding a customer’s context also helps you to evaluate whether their opinions and experience are relevant and aligned with your target audience. For example, feedback from a very niche user group may differ from your broader market.
Open conversation also gives you a chance to actively listen and pick up on subtle cues, such as recurring themes or challenges that may not surface in structured questioning.
The Funnel Technique is a structured approach you can use to move from broad, open-ended questions to more specific and targeted ones.
This progression mirrors the shape of a funnel - starting wide to gather general insights and gradually narrowing to focus on key details. The approach ensures that you capture the context of the customer’s experience as well as the granular information needed to uncover valuable insights.
Stories are a key tool in customer interviews - they often reveal underlying motivations, decision-making processes and emotional drivers that more direct questions could miss. By inviting customers to share specific experiences, you create an opportunity to explore the context, challenges, and thought processes that influenced their actions.
Story-prompting questions often sound very similar to traditional interview-style questions such as “Can you tell me about a time when you…?” or “Walk me through your last experience with…?”.
To effectively encourage storytelling you should firstly be specific, to avoid the customer focusing on unimportant details. You should also actively listen and use follow-up questions like “What happened next?” or “How did you decide to do that?” to dig deeper if needed.
Finally, you should let the customer lead. Avoid interrupting or steering the story in a specific direction, let the customer share their experience in their own words.
While a well structured interview ensures you cover your key topics, remaining flexible and open to unplanned discussions can lead to some of the most valuable and unexpected insights.
Customers often reveal their true motivations, frustrations or preferences when they feel the freedom to express themselves without being confined to a rigid question set.
To implement this, you should start with structure and then adapt - remaining ready to pivot if the customer mentions something interesting. For example, if a customer casually mentions a challenge unrelated to your initial question, ask follow-ups like “Can you tell me more about that?” or “How does that affect your decision-making process?”.
If a topic outside of your planned scope arises, don’t dismiss it. For example, a customer discussing supplier relationships might lead to insights about the importance of reliability over cost, influencing how you decide to position your product.
But it’s key to remember - balance free flow with focus - while it can be valuable to follow unexpected threads, keep the overall purpose of the interview in mind, especially given that the interviewee’s time is typically limited. Gently guide the conversation back to the main objectives if it strays too far off course.
Finally, at the end of the interview you should invite the customer to ask their own questions or share anything they feel is important but wasn’t covered. This can surface additional pain points or needs that didn’t come up before, provide feedback on your solution from a perspective you hadn’t anticipated and spark collaborative conversation.
Successful customer interviews aren’t just about asking questions - they’re about building trust, exploring motivations, and uncovering insights that go beyond your initial assumptions. This is important because customer interviews are one of the most powerful tools for understanding your audience, refining your offerings, and staying ahead of the competition.
The process definitely requires practice, reflection and refinement - but the payoff is extremely valuable.
To help you get started, we’ve created a free downloadable template featuring a structured framework for your customer interviews. It includes sample questions and prompts to explore deeper motivations.
