Questions to ask during a customer interview

5-why method that will help you pinpoint the jobs-to-be-done and customer pain points.

Customer interviews are tough. There are tiny things you can trip over and make a customer completely “shut down” or start lying to you. However, the most dangerous mistake is to play everything by the book, follow all the customer interview rules and end up missing the core customer pain. Can be easily done if you are not asking the right questions.

Fortunately, there’s a 5-Why technique that will ensure that you drill down deep enough to establish what is really nagging at your customer.

5-Why Framework History

The method is pretty old. It was developed at Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1930s to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. It became one of the cornerstones of Toyota’s famous lean manufacturing system.

The classic example of this method used at Toyota presumes that a “facilitator” or service manager, or process owner is trying to find out the root cause of the problem with the welding robot. The process owner has to ask an array of 5 questions, each one if which except for the first one is iterated based on the previous answer: