Fast-paced environments demand quick insights. Customer feedback is essential, but it can take time—what shortcuts can we leverage? 💡 Interesting thoughts here on using ChatGPT to streamline customer research. What are your go-to methods?
Can Chat-GPT replace customer interviews? Heresy! That’s what I used to think, until I realized one thing… (And yes, I do share my prompts.) People will do anything to avoid talking to customers. It’s a tale as old as time, and it ends in tears. Hence, I was suspicious. But then Mo Syed, pointed out that ChatGPT’s training set isn’t facts so much as our cultural consensus. Therefore, if the information you want from a customer interview is part of our culture, a few carefully worded prompts could get you pretty far. The Experiment I tested Mo’s approach by staging a Jobs to be Done interview using ChatGPT for a service I know nothing about - Lindy Hop dance lessons. Here’s the process I followed: 1. Discover outcomes: I started by asking what outcomes people hope to achieve from these dance lessons and got a plausible list. 2. Choose one outcome and explore that customer journey. I asked about social and emotional aspects and situational triggers that might cause spur someone to take this action. 3. Find traffic sources: I asked where somebody might look for ways to achieve this goal and got ideas for where to promote my dance school. 4. Uncover barriers to purchase: I explored customer anxieties and got advice on how to ease prospects’ fears, to help me improve the “product onboarding” for my dance school. My surprising results In our Coaching Program, I’ve seen hundreds of customer interviews, so my expectations were low. But the chatbot caught me off-guard. Like most things ChatGPT, it got me 70% of the way there. I asked my friend Tom Kerwin , a Lindy Hop dance instructor, and he said the actual reasons people try the Hop are a subset of the ones ChatGPT suggested, and the real reasons run deeper emotionally. Next, I back tested Mo’s approach with products where my team had completed real interviews and experimentally validated the customer outcome. My take was the same as Tom’s – the actual reasons are a subset of the ones from ChatGPT, but the AI misses the emotional depth and nuance, and some important details. My verdict: 1. It’s a great training tool that helps with the difficult mental shift from thinking about our product to customer outcomes. (It’s hard to overstate its value; I now use it for this purpose in our program). 2. It’s less effective with niche B2B, as less information is public, especially on the social and emotional outcomes. 3. It gives a broad list, but the actual outcome is often missing or buried deep in the list, which misses subtle but powerful emotional and social outcomes. Bottom line: It’s no substitute for listening to customers, but it’s a major upgrade over working from untested assumptions, which is what most people do. 😕 Here's the prompts: https://lnkd.in/eeBQxx8A I hope this helps! I study startup growth, and post one nugget each week, follow me if that's helpful. Matt