You’re Probably Doing Customer Interviews Wrong

Most banks think they’re learning from customers.

But most of what passes for “customer conversations” just confirms what the bank already believes.

You know the drill: “Are you satisfied with our service?” “What do you think of our new product?” “Would you recommend us?”

Those aren’t discovery questions. They’re validation questions.

They make us feel data-driven without actually learning anything new.

We typically have three kinds of conversations with customers:

1️⃣ Transactional — closing an account or collecting data. 

2️⃣ Social — the lunch, golf, or holiday card circuit. 

3️⃣ Problem-solving — fixing a specific issue.

All valuable. All necessary. But none designed to uncover insight.

If you really want to understand your customers — what they’re trying to get done, the pains they’re trying to avoid, and the gains they’re chasing — you need a different kind of dialogue.

The goal isn’t to ask about your product. It’s to explore their world.

• What job are they actually trying to accomplish?

• What workarounds have they built that you’ve never noticed? (I love discovering work-arounds that customers have built. It tells me more than they can put into words.)

• What are they doing before or after they use your product?

You’re not looking for opinions. You’re looking for patterns.

Because zero interviews yield zero insight. But the wrong interviews yield false confidence, and that’s far more dangerous.

So ask yourself: Are you truly learning from your customers? Or just talking to them the same way you always have?

If this hits close to home, follow me here or connect. I share tools and frameworks to help bank leaders turn insight into competitive advantage, including our complete Customer Interview Guide