How to Deploy Empathy to Get the Most Out of Customer Interviews, According to Geocodio's Michele Hansen

At some point in their growth, companies usually start investing in customer research. They work with consulting firms, hire their own analysts, buy data management software. But the fact is that a large portion of employees – developers, marketers, product managers (whose work depends on an intimate understanding of the customer) – rarely, if ever, interact with them. And for a while, that was the case for Michèle.

Michele Hansen is the co-founder of Geocodio, a SaaS company that provides geocoding and data matching for addresses. But we're not here today to talk about coordinates, maps, or data points. Back when Michele was a product manager, she and her colleagues used to go over the scans, brainstorm an idea or two with the customer service team, and make educated guesses about what should be. the next step on a product or feature. No customer contact time, no interviews throughout the product roadmap: just a few weeks of user testing before launch.

However, Michele soon realized that customer research had to be part of the entire product development process. She dove into the world of client interviews, and just like that, she got hooked. So addicted, in fact, that after conducting thousands of interviews, she ended up writing "Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers", which we'll talk about today.

Over the years, she has learned to use empathy in a focused and structured way to get people to open up and talk about their experiences; how you ask a question matters just as much as the questions you ask – and how to use it. so you can create products and services that will delight your customers, increase your team's motivation and grow your business.

In today's episode, I sat down with Michele to talk about all things client interviewing: how, when and who to interview; what to do with the results; and specific tactics to get the most out of it.

If you're short on time, here are some quick tips:

Using customer interviews across your business saves you the time and headache of creating something people don't want or highlighting features no one cares about. Instead of focusing only on customers who turned away, conduct interviews throughout the customer lifecycle. If important customers use certain features a lot, try to understand why so you can devote more resources to them and pursue other organizations with similar needs. You can find participants in your customer base or even on social media, and having the opportunity to influence your roadmap can be enough of an incentive for them to accept the interview. Your choice of words, your tone of voice and your actions during the interview all work together and make the difference between getting a good, useful result or not.

If you like our discussion, check out other episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in the reader of your choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

Dive into customer research

Liam Geraghty: Michele, thank you so much for joining us. You are welcome to the show. To start, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your career?

Michele Hansen: Yes. I'm the co-founder of Geocodio, which is a small software company. My husband and I started this business eight and a half years ago. I started as a project manager in a web development agency, then I became a product manager and, during this time, I ran Geocodio on the side. So I've been running it full-time for five years now, actually.

Liam: I know we're going to talk about your book today, but Geocodio is so cool. Could you tell us a bit more about what it does?

Michele: Yes. So the core of what we do is geocoding, which turns addresses into coordinates and coordinates into addresses, and we do that because computers don't understand an address. They only understand contact details. If you want to create a map or if you type directions in a map application, in the background this address is converted into coordinates and the distance or route is calculated between them. And where we focus on that market is specifically on the US and Canada and the data matching needs. Many people need contact details for other t...