Ask Your Customer-Facing Colleagues to Recruit

Most companies have teams who are on the phone with customers day in and day out. This includes sales teams, account managers, customer-success teams, and customer-support teams.

You can work with these teams to help you recruit interview participants. The easiest place to start is to ask a customer-facing colleague if you can join one of their existing meetings. Start by asking for five minutes at the end of a call. You want to make it as easy as possible for both your colleague and your customer to say “Yes.” Use the last few minutes of an existing call to collect a specific story about the customer.

Once your customer-facing teams are comfortable with you joining their meetings, ask your customer-facing colleagues to help you schedule an interview with one of their customers. To make this work, you’ll want to define triggers to help your customer-facing colleagues identify who to reach out to. Triggers might include:

• If a customer calls to cancel their subscription, schedule an interview.
• If a customer has a question about feature x, schedule an interview.
• If a customer requests a customization, schedule an interview.

Triggers can change week over week. The key is to clearly communicate to your customer-facing team who you would like to interview and to make it easy for them to schedule the interview. Give them a script to follow. It might be as simple as this: If the customer trigger occurs, then say: “I’d love for you to share your feedback with our product team. Can we schedule 20 minutes for you to talk with them?” If they say “Yes,” have your colleague schedule the interview.