About Interviews and Customer Service

Many times I though, while listening how other people did just a few interviews, between 5 and 10, for an important job, how wrong that could be. Coming from engineering I was taught that you need to survey a huge amount of people to make your research meaningful. But there is a big between a survey and an in-depth interview. And that’s what I learned this time. Let me tell you how and why.

First of all, and clearly, the class related to this subject was very useful. Many times before I read how asking something would  lead to a certain answer, and it was proven at the first interview, with the people of LAN, where we were too specific describing our work and even before finishing the description the began to told us all this specific information. It was useful, but didn’t let us get another kind of information that we wanted, and completely sent to the trash the guide we’ve prepared.

Having that in mind, and looking a second time to the class’ slides, I prepare myself to the user interviews much more carefully, trying to do the question as broader as possible, avoiding leading the answer in any direction but the one the interviewee wanted to go. Also here I noticed that, asking correctly, people didn’t tend to answer other topics, and if they did, it wasn’t very difficult to lead the interview where we wanted again.

Other thing I noticed is that at the beginning of the interview it seems that people wanted to say a lot of things really fast, like they were expecting someone to come and ask them about this or that topic; so at this point one must be careful to get all the useful information.  Also, I noticed that, with a little digging, people know what they expect from the services they used or are going to use, and have very clear expectations, at least regarding the travel agency and buying tickets online, and you can have a good idea of what is happening and missing.

At the other side, concerning the interviews itself, there were a few points worth noticing. The first one concerns communication issues. In the  interview with the people of LAN, they kind of told us that many problems came from culture, that, in general, people didn’t listen what they told them and just wanted to buy the ticket, and later they came with a problem that wouldn’t happened if they really listened in the first place. Clearly, this could be avoided if this was taken in account when thinking and designing the customer service experience. Also, one of the customers interviewed told us that the travel agent never actually answered the doubts that she had, only giving her information that, I think, the agent was trained to give, and at the end giving a bad service. Also the other woman interviewed told us how bad Lan’s call center was, and made me think how much the communication issue affects services in general.

Also concerning this, one of the interviewee had the opinion that Lan’s webpage was actually a bit confusing due to the excessive amount of information that was given in a tiny space, and that she used the page easily because she has used it a lot of times, and knew how.

This is another topic we found, learning. It seems, in my opinion, that Lan actually wants that the user learn how to use their site, without making any changes for a time now as we were told, to make things easier. This should really be taken into account to change their page; they could also allow them to differentiate themselves from other airlines websites, as they are much a copycat one of each other. Also, it would allow a broader audience to use their page and actually buying a ticket, and not asking people, many times without the time or patience to learn something new that, in the first place, should be easy.

At the end, I learnt that the interviews are really useful to gather good information and that you don’t need that much, so I would have this present the next time I have to gather information from customers. Also, I found that it isn’t so difficult to make people tell the story you want to hear, and that this let you find new information that you haven’t even thought of in the first place. Finally, I found again that communication is a key issue in the services area, and one must understand the user needs and not fight them, but work with them