You will be able to run a 20-minute customer interview that uncovers the moment they decided to buy.
Ask a happy customer what they think of your business and you will hear something kind and vague. "Very good, the teachers are nice, my daughter enjoys it." You thank them, feel pleased for an hour, and learn almost nothing you can write with. Priya, the tuition centre owner from lesson 1.2, did this for years. She called it customer feedback. It gave her the same three adjectives every time.
The fix is to change what you ask about. People are poor at explaining their opinions and good at telling you what happened. A short interview built around events, rather than views, gives you the trigger that made someone start looking, the options they weighed and the worry that nearly stopped them. Those are the raw materials for a headline, a page and an answer to an objection.
An opinion question asks the customer to step back and judge: what do you like about us, how would you rate the service, what could we do better. Most people answer politely and briefly. A story question asks them to remember: when did you first start looking for tuition, what was happening at home that week, what were you doing about maths before you found us.
Memory brings back detail. A parent asked what she likes about the centre says "the teachers are patient". The same parent asked what happened the week she started looking says "he cried over his homework three nights in a row and I realised I couldn't explain it the way school teaches it now". The second answer is a page of copy.
If you took Digital marketing foundations, you have met this idea in lesson 3.2, Customers hire products to get a job done. The interview is how you find out what the job was, in the customer's own words.
Every interview hunts for three things.
The trigger is the event that turned a background worry into action. It is rarely "I saw your ad". It is a result slip, a comment from a teacher, a friend's child doing better, a deadline. The trigger tells you which moment to write for.
The alternatives are everything the customer considered, including doing nothing. For tuition that might be another centre, a private tutor, a relative, YouTube videos, or assessment books at home. Alternatives tell you what your reader is comparing you with, which is rarely the competitor you worry about most.
The doubt is what nearly stopped them. "I was worried it would be another expensive thing he hates." "I didn't know if a group class would be too fast for her." Doubts become the objections your page has to answer.
A good interview guide is short and in order of events. Start with life before, move to the trigger, then the search, then the decision, then what happened after. Questions that work well:
Before you found us, what were you doing about this? When did you first think you needed help? What was going on then? What else did you look at, and what made you rule each one out? What almost made you not sign up? What happened in the first few weeks?
Follow every answer with a plain prompt to go further: "What happened next?", "Tell me more about that", or "What do you mean by too fast?" The second answer is usually better than the first, because the customer has stopped giving the polite version.
People are kind to the person in front of them. Ask whether they like your product and nearly everyone says yes, including people who are about to cancel. The answer feels good and changes nothing. Questions about the future have a similar flaw. "Would you recommend us?" and "Would you pay more for a weekend class?" invite a guess about behaviour that has not happened.
Questions about the past are harder to dress up. Someone either looked at two other centres or they did not. If you want to know whether people would recommend you, ask whether they have told anyone about you, and what they said.
Pick a customer who bought recently, within the last few months, while the memory is fresh. Recent customers remember the trigger and the doubt. Long-standing ones have usually forgotten them.
Ask for 20 minutes by phone or video call and say why: you are improving how you explain your service, and their experience will help. Before you start, ask whether you may record the call so you can keep their exact words, and tell them you will not publish anything with their name without asking. If they say no, take notes and write down phrases word for word.
If you record, transcribe. Many phone and video call apps can produce a transcript, and you can also type it up yourself. The point is to keep their words. Your memory of an interview is a summary, and summaries lose exactly the phrases you were looking for. The PDPA applies to recordings and transcripts like any other personal data, so store them safely and keep them only as long as you need them.
Listen far more than you talk. If you catch yourself explaining your service, stop. Silence after an answer is useful. People often fill it with the most honest sentence of the call.
When Priya ran her first interview this way, a mother told her she had chosen the centre over a cheaper tutor because "a tutor at home felt like one more thing I had to manage". Priya had never thought of convenience for parents as a reason to choose her. It became a line on her website.
Your activity is to write your own guide and book a real interview. Keep the questions in time order, and make sure at least one question hunts for each of the trigger, the alternatives, the doubt and the result.
Write an interview guide of eight questions about the trigger, alternatives, doubts and result, and book one interview with a recent customer.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).