6 strategies to conduct interviews that uncover the customer journey

Design interview questions and learn techniques that uncover your customer’s hidden needs. 

AI is making Journey Management  faster and easier than ever before. For example, TheyDo’s JourneyAI transforms customer data into actionable journey maps in minutes. However, no matter how much AI speeds up and streamlines the process, you can’t ever skip the crucial step of talking directly to your customers. 

Improving the customer experience begins with understanding and mapping their journeys. Thanks to AI tools, it’s now easier than ever to transcribe customer calls across different areas like UX research, sales, and support. However, turning this wealth of data into customer journeys that everyone can understand is extremely time-consuming. According to a Nielsen Norman Group study, it takes 73.8 hours—just under 2 full weeks (assuming a 40-hour work week)—to create a journey map, the most time being spent on external research (20.6 hours) and synthesizing that research (16.4 hours). That's where Journey AI comes in. It simplifies the process, letting you skip the grunt work and move from scattered documents to journeys in just a few minutes.

To harness the full power of Journey AI, your customer interviews need to contain specific details about how and why they take the actions they do. Here, we've outlined five strategies for customer journey interviewing that will ensure you get a more nuanced and complete understanding of customer needs, experiences, and decisions.

Strategy 1: Follow the journey timeline

While it can be hard to ask customers what they need from you in the future, you can easily help them uncover the steps they took to get to an outcome they already had. Every customer experience is a journey with distinct phases. There are many different ways to structure and label journeys but it ultimately comes down to understanding the customer’s timeline. 

In an interview, let your questions act as a guide, walking through time with the customer as the tour guide of their own journey.

• First thought: identify the trigger that initiates the journey

• Passive and active looking: understand the exploration phase

• Decision: explore the moment of truth or how they connected the dots

• Action: dive into the buying, doing, or completing phase

• Reflecting: uncover post-action reflections

What to look for:

• Order of events: understand the chronological sequence of events

• Actions: distinguish between actions the person took and external factors influencing them

• Obstacles: identify pain points that cause frustration or get in the way of progress toward their goal (these pains help uncover the real opportunity)

• Delights: recognize the benefits or positive ‘gains’ that helped the person satisfy their needs

Prepare a draft timeline before you start interviewing, turning the phases into phrasing that makes sense to your business. Walk through the steps of your customer journey as if you are the customer so that you’re familiar with the path. During the interview, let this serve as a red thread to ensure that you’ve covered everything, mentally placing the interviewee’s responses into the different phases as you listen. Download the interview script template for concrete questions you can ask as you move through the timeline.

Strategy 2: Set the stage

People are notoriously bad at remembering things correctly. Our brains make up stories for the gaps in our memory. Setting the stage and treating the interview like a casual conversation can help enhance the accuracy of their memory. 

• Explore details: ask questions about situational details like weather, time of day, and location 

• Casual conversational tone: frame the interview as a way to understand the customer’s experience, almost as if you were to assume the role of documentary-maker (you can even say this) 

• Explicit purpose: explain why you are doing the research (e.g. to understand the language people use when talking about your product) and emphasize that there are no wrong answers

Example script

[Name of person], we’re trying to understand the experience people have when they buy a new mobile phone. I’d love to have a conversation to get your story. Imagine I’m shooting a documentary and I am trying to understand why you bought the phone you currently have. I may ask some odd questions, but I’m not trying to get through a list. I just want to hear your story.

Strategy 3: Uncover the first thought

There simply isn’t any space in your customers’ mind for information about your product or solution until they’ve had their ‘first thought’. For instance, the moment that a customer thinks, “Doing groceries really takes a lot of time” or “My car is getting really old”, is the real start of their customer journey. You’re looking for this exact moment that triggers the action or uncovers the need for a solution. Be sure to ask detailed questions to really get your customer to remember the moment as vividly as they can.

Example script

At some point, something happened that made you say, “Today’s the day I’m buying a new mobile phone.” Tell me about that. At what point did you have that thought? At what point did you think, “Okay I need a new phone”?

Dig deeper into that first thought with detailed questions such as: Were you sitting on your couch? When you got the pricey bill, did you view it on your phone or computer? Or did it land on your doormat? Ok, so you were standing in the hallway? What was the day like?

Strategy 4: Look for signals

When interviewing, it’s important to pick up on the important clues that people might give you while you’re talking. Practice being on the lookout for the following indicators.

• Causality: Nothing is random. Always seek the explanations behind certain actions to understand the forces at play. Many people will say ‘it was an impulse’ or ‘it was random’ in response to why they did something. Dig deeper into these seemingly random or impulsive decisions and get them to connect the dots. For example: “I bought a mattress on an impulse”. Clarify this response with another question: “Had you been sleeping well”? You might find out that it’s been two years since they had a good night’s sleep.

• Trade-offs: People will give up one thing to get another. Recognize the sacrifices or trade-offs that customers make in the name of progress. For example, a friend recently bought a brand new gold iPhone, although she wanted a black one. She settled for the gold because it would have taken a few more weeks to get the black one. 

• Lies: Everybody lies, but not always with the intention. They’re merely telling the stories that fit their world and their identity, and this surface layer is often not the real truth. You need to go beyond the surface. Don’t assume that someone has told you the objective truth. Try to put yourself in the person’s shoes and consider why they might be telling the story a certain way.

Strategy 5: Hone in on the challenging moments

Every stage in the customer journey has a tipping point—a moment where a customer struggles to move forward and make progress. Identifying and understanding these challenges, commonly referred to as pain points, provides insights into opportunities for delivering business value. 

Dive into a challenging moment by asking a question right at the moment that someone describes an action. An example is, “What was holding you back before you did [action]”? 

Get someone to add another detail to the answer they already provided by asking, “So, what happened next”?

Strategy 6: Use power prompts

Asking open-ended questions is a fundamental interviewing technique, but incorporating power prompts adds nuance to your approach. Here’s a shortlist of power prompts to keep on hand during an interview: 

• What do you mean by…?:  Unpack vague words as much as possible. Ask your interviewee to explain what she means with her own words, instead of filling in the blanks yourself.

• Repeat responses as a question: Repeating someone’s own words back to them as a question indicates that you want them to re-articulate the answer. This tactic usually results in people giving you the same answer with different words. Chances are you will learn something new.

• Are you trying to say that..?:  If you think that someone is talking about a challenge, labeling it in a question form helps to get a confirmation of your hunch.

• Summarize: If you’ve been given a very long answer, it often helps to summarize what you have heard. 

• Revert to your ‘documentary maker’ persona: Don’t hesitate to fall back on your earlier setup. You can say, “Now, imagine I want to shoot the scene where you are… What happened?”

• Frame personal questions: It can be awkward to ask a ‘stranger’ about something personal such as their health. You can use a simple setup to make people have an easy way out. Example:  “I’ve got a personal question, and if you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to but…?”

Start having journey-generating conversations

Getting good at talking with customers is crucial for creating detailed and valuable customer journeys. While a tool like Journey AI can make mapping journeys easier, the real insights come from direct conversations with customers. All of these tactics focus on making customer interviews more precise and insightful. 

With improved customer interviews powered by Journey AI, businesses can go beyond just mapping journeys; they can uncover the genuine and often hidden needs of their customers. Start using these strategies in your customer journey interviews and get to a place where customer journeys are not just mapped but truly understood.

Want more tips for customer journey interviewing? See our article: How to conduct better user interviews.