In this episode of Jobs-to-be-Done Radio, startup marketer Amrita Chandra of RocketScope joins Bob Moesta, Chris Spiek, and Ervin Fowlkes to talk about putting the Switch Interview to work on a real product. Fresh out of a Switch workshop, Amrita ran more than 30 jobs-to-be-done interviews for a Spotify-like streaming service and came back with hard-won lessons about how customers actually choose, switch, and stick.
Read on to learn why you should never schedule eight interviews in a day, how light users and heavy users hire the same product for completely different jobs, why customers rarely compare you to the competitor you think they do, and how to recruit, schedule, and run interviews so people actually show up and open up.
Key takeaways
- Interviewing is real work, so pace yourself. Five interviews a day is about the limit. Amrita scheduled eight in a single day and was fried by the end. Past five or six, you start phoning it in.
- Patterns show up fast. Distinct customer segments became obvious by the fifth to eighth interview. By fifteen you have the bulk of it.
- Customers don’t compare you to who you think. The streaming product’s heavy users weren’t comparing it to rival services. They compared it to anything that relieves boredom: radio, satellite radio, TV, a book.
- Heavy users and light users hire for different jobs. Heavy users had already built a habit and wanted variety. Light users had no habit yet, so the work was guiding their first listens and making them aware of new contexts to use it.
- Data tells you what, not why. Numbers are good at telling you what happened. Jobs-to-be-Done tells you why, and the two work best together.
- Interview the people who fire you, too. The next round of interviews targeted customers who cancelled, because small fixable misunderstandings were driving churn.
Meet Amrita Chandra and RocketScope
Announcer: Welcome to the latest addition of Jobs to be Done radio, where we discuss how to apply the Jobs to be Done framework, to understand why consumers switch from one product to another, and ultimately, how to get more customers to switch to your product. And here are your hosts.
Chris: Okay, so, welcome to the latest addition of Jobs to be Done radio, I’m Chris Spieck and as always, I’m joined by Bob Moesta and Ervin Fowlkes, hey guys.
Bob: Hey Chris, how are you?
Chris: And today we also have a very special guest, we’re joined by Amrita Chandra, from Rocket Scope in Toronto, Canada. Amrita joined us at a switch workshop at 37 signals a couple months ago over the summer here, and we’re really, really excited to have her on to learn about the ways that she’s been applying Jobs to be Done since coming to the workshop and learning the interview technique, and learning the basics. So welcome Amrita.
Amrita: Thanks, nice to be here.
Chris: Great. So, Ervin, I know you guys have been talking a lot since the switch workshop, why don’t you kick us off and get the background. Let’s hear what’s been going on.
Ervin: Well, sure! For those of you that have been to a switch workshop, and you’ve [inaudible 0:01:10], once aspect of this whole thing; How many interviews have people done? Well, a couple people respond back, but Amrita responded back with 22 interviews. That blew my mind, like, okay, I have to talk to this interviewing machine, I have to find out what’s going on to take that many interviews. So, Amrita, if you can just give us a little background about you, and tell us about Rocket Scope, what you do, just so we can have somewhere to start.
Amrita: Sure! So, I’ve worked in marketing for about 20 years, kind of a life long marketer. I started out, actually, at Nestle, in the consumer packaging space, but I realized quickly that I’m not a big company person, so for probably about 15 years I’ve been working in the tech industry, mostly with smaller type companies,
Six or eight months ago I started a company with my business partner, Eva Bumford, and we were both experienced marketers and we were seeing first hand that a lot of start ups struggle with marketing, and especially around customer addition and retention, but they weren’t necessarily at the point where it made sense for them to hire a VP of marketing.
So we started this company to help them in a way that’s a little different from other traditional [inaudible 0:02:23]. We really wanted companies to build marketing expertise inside their organization. Similar to how you guys are really helping companies, or people, build expertise around jobs to be done inside their companies or on their own.
So that’s essentially how we work with the start ups we work with. We offer our services in a bit of a novel way; we allow our clients to sign up for a monthly subscription, so they use us as much or as little as they like, and we’re kind of embedded inside their organizations working with their teams to get them to be better at marketing. That’s my long intro spiel.
The push: passively looking to get better at understanding customers
Ervin: That is awesome. So what is your [inaudible 0:03:06] to interviews, I didn’t ask my favorite question. So, tell me about the time you had to first talk about Jobs to be Done, how did you get introduced to us?
Amrita: Well, it’s kind of a funny thing, because I actually didn’t know anything about Jobs to be Done, I must have been living under a rock for the last few years. I have been a Base Camp customer on and off for a few years now, and I remember seeing a tweet from – I think it was just from the main 37 Signals Twitter account, saying something about this switch workshop. And I remember really loving the question that they asked. It asked something about, how do you get from what you were doing before to where you are today, something like that, like, what made you switch?
Amrita: And so, I was like, oh, this is kind of interesting, Chicago’s not that far away, and I showed up in Chicago and I’m like, oh! Chris and Bob and Roy! And, all these people that I hadn’t really been introduced to before, and so it was kind of nice, because I think there were a lot of people in the room that day who were really familiar with you, so it was kind of interesting for me to, literally with fresh eyes, not knowing anything about your frame work, to come in and sign up for this workshop.
Ervin: Since you’re relatively indoctrinated into the Jobs to be Done, I can talk to you like we both know jobs. So, tell me about the push, what was going on that made you like, ugh, okay, there’s a better way? What was going on for you?
Amrita: Well, I think some of it was more of a general, I would say, if you want to be in the passively looking phase for probably forever, in that I’m always looking for ways to be better at what I do. So even though I feel really good about my skills as a marketer, I know that I don’t know everything. The minute stop learning the minute you start [inaudible 0:05:02] so, I just like the idea of seeing what else is out there that I can learn to become better at understanding our customers, so that’s the push. I just felt like, what I was doing to date was fine, but I didn’t feel like it completely crystallized the insight I was trying to get, so that’s probably how I would describe the push.
Concept · The Four Forces of Progress
The push that starts a switch
Every switch begins with a push: the friction or dissatisfaction in your current situation that creates energy to look for something new. Amrita’s push was subtle. Nothing was broken, but she sensed her existing approach was not crystallizing the customer insight she wanted. That low-grade dissatisfaction is exactly the kind of force that moves someone from passively looking to actively trying a new method.
The pull of a fundamental question
Bob: Hey Ervin, let me hijack and jump in with one question and then you can get on with the rest of them. Amrita, do you remember what you expected it to be similar to when you signed up? Or, did you have that thought at all, like this switch thing sounds similar to something else I already know or something else I heard about, or did this feel like it was kind of out on its own?
Amrita: I felt like it was really very different, because it asked, and sort of answered, I guess, a really fundamental question, and I felt like even the way you phrased the question in terms of what were people doing before and what made them switch to what they were doing now. It seems like kind of an obvious question, but it isn’t an obvious question, and I think that a lot of people don’t think of things that way, because it really comes back to what the person is doing and what their context is and not what the company is doing. So I think that really drew me. It was like, wow these guys are asking a really fundamental question that is so important to anybody running a company. And that drew me, and of course I would say a kind of, I’m not one of the core, 37 Signals fanbase, but I’ve certainly read Jason Creek. I occasionally read something that they publish and so I thought, “Oh, okay, these guys are smart guys and they seem to have really thought that this methodology was helpful, so that was definitely something that helped pull me towards them.
Bob: Yeah, yeah, great.
Practice early and often: how Amrita did 30 interviews
Ervin: Tell me you do Jobs to be Done. So, you left the switchboard show, what was your next step to that?
Amrita: So, I left the switch workshop and you know, when I like something, I tend to be a little obsessive about going after it. So I was like, this is awesome! I learned a bunch of good stuff, I liked that there was this hands on session in the workshop where we got to actually try it out ourselves.
Amrita: I could tell that I really liked doing it, but I could tell that I needed a lot of practice and so the first thing I did was, you know, the best thing you can do is try and practice it right away and not have a really long time pass. So, I had friends visiting that weekend and I had them all do interviews with me, anybody I could talk to, didn’t matter what they were talking about, but I did probably about then practice interviews within the first couple of weeks. I think I did a handful that weekend, and then did a handful practice ones within the next week. Again, just because I wanted to make sure I was remembering what I learned and practicing that.
Amrita: Interestingly enough, one of my clients in particular, I work with a handful of companies, but one of them had a real obvious gap around understanding their customers, and in general I have to say I think one of the reasons why your work is so important, is because I think that most companies, they think they know their customers but they actually don’t, really.
Amrita: So this company, that I’ve been working really closely with, they had a bunch of data, they have some third party market research, but even before I went to the workshop I remember thinking, these guys really need to get deeper into understanding the heart of why their customers choose them, and so after the switch workshop, I decided to actually do a bunch on interviews on behalf of the client, normally we don’t go off and do this work, but it was just something I was excited to do and they were really interested in having me help with it. So we ended up recruiting a bunch of customers and I probably did about a dozen interviews right away, and I’m happy to tell you a little bit more of what happened in those interviews, and then I probably did another ten. So I’ve done about ten practice ones and about 22 ones with actual customers, so I’m at about 30 now.
Concept · The Switch Interview
There is no shortcut to reps
The Switch Interview is a skill, and like any skill it is built through reps. Amrita’s instinct was right: practice immediately after learning, on anyone who will talk to you, before the lessons fade. The technique reconstructs the timeline of a real decision so you can hear the push, pull, anxiety, and habit in the customer’s own words. The only way to get good at hearing those forces is to keep running interviews.
There is a catalog of actual interviews along with analysis available here.
Why you should never schedule eight interviews in a day
Chris: Do you find them fun?
Amrita: I do! I love talking to people, so for me, it’s definitely fun, it’s definitely work though. I think it’s a lot harder than it looks and I think you guys make it look really easy because you guys are really good at it! And when you actually start to do it, even I think I’m pretty good at talking to people and I really like understanding people, but when you’re doing it, in that kind of context, you’re still trying to make sure that you gather up the right kind of information, so it is work. I had one day where I made the mistake, in hindsight, of scheduling like, eight interviews in one day. I was fried by the end of that day.
Bob: It takes a lot of mind space to do those, that’s for sure.
Chris: I’m actually glad you said that, though, because I don’t think at any point during the switch workshop do we caveat that. Ervin and I, and Bob, would all say, like, if a client would ever ask us to do more than five or six in a day, it’s like you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, so I think we need to start telling people that. So it’s a huge compliment to hear that we make it look easy or that we look good at it, but I’d say that it might get a little bit easier and more natural as you practice, but from an energy perspective, you’re always exhausted.
Bob: Five is probably the limit, the sixth one is usually when you’re phoning it in. There’s not enough energy left in the body.
Amrita: I totally agree with you. And again, I think, like with anything, you kind of learn when you do it, and I wouldn’t have known it if I hadn’t done that, and now that I’ve done it, I’m never going to do it again.
Bob: Even if we would have said only five, there would be people going, “Oh no, no, we can do six or seven,” and you’re like, “Okay, you go for it, just do me a favor, text me how you feel when you’re at the end of that seventh one.”
Amrita: Yeah, you sort of feel like when you’re eating this big, beautiful meal and you need to have some sorbet in between each plate, to cleanse your pallet. That’s sort of how I felt at the end of that day.
“Five is probably the limit, the sixth one is usually when you’re phoning it in. There’s not enough energy left in the body.”Bob Moesta
Light users vs heavy users: same product, different jobs
Bob: So I have to ask, so you’ve done 22, so when you do the ten practice ones, they’re usually not on the same thing, so you don’t see patterns. On the 22 customer ones, when did you start to see patterns?
Amrita: I can say pretty early on. Like, within, even as soon as five interviews. One of the things that was interesting was that we were originally looking at all the customers in one bucket, and when we started to do the interviews, definitely by the time I got to maybe seven or eight, it was very obvious that there were actually two distinct types of customers, really depending on which type of subscription these guys had signed up for.
Amrita: So this company makes a product kind of like Spotify, it’s not Spotify, but that’s the closest thing I can compare it to. You pay monthly to listen to a bunch of stuff. One of the things we found out pretty early on was actually, we had two kinds of primary customer segments, like the people I would call “light users” [inaudible 0:12:25] a light plan, and then “heavy users” and they had some very distinct answers. We realized after the first ten or so that we wanted to go back and interview another group of them and specifically choose people from each of these two separate groups, because we felt like we were going to get different insights from them, so that’s definitely what we found.
Bob: So then within the heavy users, you found different kinds of heavy users and different light users?
Amrita: We didn’t [inaudible 0:13:27], you could probably split them into another segment, but I think there was enough distinctness about the heavy users, but one of the things we realized when we were doing these interviews was that the heavy users had already formed a habit around consuming this type of service. For them it was mostly about feeding the beast, it was giving them enough variety of things to listen to, whereas the light users were easier to lose as a customer, because they might try it out and if they hadn’t been in the habit of listening to this service in different situations, it would be very easy for them to cancel their service because they weren’t in the habit, so we found that they were comparing this company to very different categories of things when we talk about the pull of the product, it’s very different for these two.
Bob: It’s almost like, how do I get the light user to become the heavy user, and what were the tips I had to offer to get them there?
Concept · The Four Forces of Progress
Habit is a force that holds people in place
Habit is one of the two forces that resist change. For the streaming service’s heavy users, habit worked in the company’s favor: they had already woven listening into their daily lives, so they were hard to lose. Light users had no such habit, which made them easy to cancel. The same product faces a completely different forces equation depending on whether the customer has built a habit yet.
Customers don’t compare you to who you think they do
Amrita: Exactly. When it came to the heavy user, it was mostly about, how do you make sure that you have enough variety so they feel like they’re getting enough of what they think they signed up for. One of the things that’s really interesting about which interviews, which I would say applies even to the practice ones I was doing, is that people never are comparing you to who you think they’re comparing you to. Most companies think that your customers are comparing you head to head with another competitor in that same category, but in most cases you’re not. So in the case of this company, they weren’t comparing us to their competitors, the heavy users were comparing us with other things that relieve boredom. So, listening to network radio, subscribing to satellite radio, watching TV, reading a book, so that was what they were comparing us to, versus what we thought, this is all about convincing them that we’re better than this other company, when it really wasn’t the case at all. You just wanted them to feel like you will never have to be bored again if you sign up for this service.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. That’s usually one of the first big ‘ah-has’ that people get, is that it’s not a rational extension of you. So, the thing is, when customers are actually comparing, they’re wrapping everything else around it, so it’s how a Snickers bar competes with a Coke, or, to be honest, how a scotch and a run compete with each other around how to end your day.
Amrita: Uh-huh.
Chris: And how no one would think that the two compete, but the fact is, depending on the situation, they’d hire one or the other to help them unwind from the day.
Amrita: That’s so interesting, I’d never think to have rum at the end of the day.
Chris: But that’s what I’m saying, it’s just like what you said, it’s not what you think it is.
Bob: Oh, you said a run, like a jog.
Chris: A run.
Amrita: Oh, you said a run!
Bob: Yeah, I thought you said a rum too.
Chris: Yeah, it was like a jog or a run, or a scotch. So it’s between are you healthy or not healthy, and that’s just not relevant, it’s one of those things like, how was your day, and if the day was bad enough, the scotch actually wins.
Amrita: Yeah.
“people never are comparing you to who you think they’re comparing you to.”Amrita Chandra
The big hire and the little hire: contexts of consumption
Bob: So one of the things, I don’t know how much we get into this, I think we do it differently every switch workshop, so the one you were at, I’m not sure, but we talk about the big hire and the little hire. So, the big one is the switch, when they actually purchase something new, and we have these little hire moments of when are you actually consuming the product or service that you bought.
Bob: I’m always fascinated by these, and I don’t know exactly what the company is and you don’t need to disclose it, but the streaming media services, what do they compete with, and when are people actually turning them on? Is it drive time, is it relaxation, is it learning, without disclosing everything, were you able to get into those kind of details of consumption when your service was winning and when it was set to the side for something else?
Amrita: Yeah, I think one of the things we learned by doing these interviews was that, with the heavy users, they were using in a variety of different environments. So driving was a big one, they were bored with listening to the radio, and they liked the option of their streaming service, so driving was a big one. What surprised me was that the heavy users were using the service in any context where they had a big chunk of time coming up, either at one time or repeatedly, where they were going to be by themselves. So I had this one interview, which is kind of funny, with this lady, about how she just got her baby and she was out walking her baby, and so she’s listening to this thing while she’s with her baby. So I was sort of asking her at the end to talk about her baby, and it turns out it was actually a dog, it wasn’t a child. So that was kind of interesting because all of a sudden she had these chunks of time where she’s walking her dog by herself, so that didn’t exist before she had her dog, and I don’t think the company would ever have thought about looking into groups of people who are getting dogs.
Amrita: So there are definitely certain commonalities in terms of the heavy users, because they were in the habit. I think with the light users, one of the hardest challenges is that they’re not in the habit and so, they only maybe associate, when I’m sitting down at my desk and working I’m going to listen to this thing, and so if they haven’t sat down at their desk, then they’re not going to be using this service. How can we make them aware that they can listen, while you’re doing your housework, or you can listen to it while you’re out at the gym, and so part of it was more of an education around context, whereas with the heavy users, they were hiring it before, the big job was that primary thing, maybe they’re commuting, and then the little hire sort of then more about relieving boredom, but in different environments.
Bob: That’s where I think this is really powerful, is that, if you think about it, the heavy users have already innovated. They’ve figured out how to put it into really different places in their lives. The growth comes from being able to say, now that I know that this is where people can go, how do I get the light user to become the heavy user, in that aspect? Because they think about it here but they don’t think about it there. If they can go back and look at the data and look at consumption, you can find out, is there day part issues. I’m not sure if everybody starts as a heavy user, but it might be the fact that as they grow, it’s like, “Okay, this person seems to be using it a lot in the evening, maybe we should highlight some opportunities in the morning for them. Or these people are using it really in the morning or the 5:00 range, is there a way to highlight?” and so you can actually build adaptive marketing to say, hey, how do we actually enable these people to do something different?
Amrita: Exactly, and I think we find that people who are light users, because they’ve never listened to this type of thing before, you really want their first few days with the product to be, I mean you want that for everyone, but they’re not going to stick it out because they don’t have a habit, so you need to make sure that, one of the insights we got, we want to kind of guide their initial experience in a particular way to make it easy for them to have their first few listens and make it fool proof. So, again, we have lots of data we can pull in terms of product usage, so again what I like is that it just gave us a lot more context that added a lot more color to stuff that we were wondering about, because a lot of companies now, everyone is talking about data and marketers have to be really data driven, and I think data can be really good, but there’s a lot that data doesn’t tell you, you can make some really bad conclusions by just looking at numbers and not necessarily doing this sort of qualitative stuff as well.
Data tells you what, jobs tell you why
Bob: So we’ve been working with Clay quite a bit on the whole notion of big data, but the reality is that, with more data comes more noise, and what this does is help you start to build theory of how things are happening that then allow you to go mine the data with an intent in mind.
Bob: So trying to find patterns in the data without an understanding of how it works is very time consuming and very rarely would you ever get to the kinds of insights that you have. If you do a limited set of interviews, like you said, by seven or eight, you’re getting repeat, by 15 you’ve got the bulk of it there. How do I now translate that back into the data set to see this kind of story versus that kind of story, or how do I see this kind of user versus that kind user, now it’s the signal to the signal to noise, it’s the thing of what’s the intent of what they’re trying to do. You’re never going to be able to use the math, because math can correlate, but math can’t tall you causality.
Amrita: I was just going to say that, the data tells you the what, and many of the companies that I work with, they’re fast products, software and services, so they have tons of data that they can pull, and so the data is really good at telling what happened but it’s not really good at telling you why it happened, and so that’s where I find the Jobs to be Done framework has been really helpful. It really works together with the data, and I really don’t think you want to have one or the other, I think you want to use them both together.
Chris: In base camp, we were able to dive into some of that data, and you can just see the fact is that there are some people who think about it as, just let me think this through, versus, I want to hold people accountable, and you can just tell by the first two days of usage how they’re going.
Amrita: Right.
Chris: Now that you understand that there are those different kinds of cover your ass kind of people, or help me think it through people, I think the notion is that you can actually then help them do that faster or be more successful with it.
Concept · The basics
Correlation versus causality
Data is excellent at describing what happened, but it cannot explain why. Math can show correlation, never causation. Jobs-to-be-Done supplies the missing causal theory: the job a customer was trying to get done. The two are not rivals. Build the theory from interviews, then use it to mine your data with intent.
Turning insight into action: experiments and retention
Amrita: Right, and one of the things that I wanted to make sure when I did the Jobs to be Done interview, was that I don’t want this to be something where I get all these insights and I’m like, “Well that’s great, now I’m more informed.”
Amrita: It was really important to me that I sort of thought about, “Okay, how is this going to change what my client does as a company, how are we going to change, to market to customers,” because then you can run some experiments and validate the things that you gathered in the interview. That’s what we’re in the process of doing now, is taking some of what we learned and changing the way we communicate; we have different streams of communication for light users and heavy users, and we’re doing some test ads as well. We’re going to see whether or not we can convert people based on the situational context and not just people who are searching for this kind of service, but people who are kind of predisposed to being good candidates for the service, because they’re doing these other activities where they’re having long stretches of time by themselves.
Amrita: It’ll be interesting to run the ads and we’re doing a bunch of other stuff around it, which is why I think this is really great. You’re not just taking a bunch of insights and going, okay great, now I’m smarter and I think I know things better about my customers, we’re taking the next step to validating what we learned.
Chris: Yep. That’s the big thing, what can you change to do the job better, that’s the whole aspect of it. You’ve got to make sure you have the second half of being practical about it and experimenting, that’s awesome.
Inside the method: capturing and grouping the stories
Bob: So Amrita, we’re always curious, we’re constantly experimenting with different analysis methods, for lack of a better term, and that goes to both how we set up a project or a set of interviews, to say, this is the question we’re really out to answer. Let’s always get back to this question after each interview and really focus on it. All the way to, when we’re done, how do we compare and contrast and group everything together, how did that aspect go for you? Did the stories group pretty naturally or did you guys have a white board process that you went through or anything like that, or was it pretty ad hoc?
Amrita: I think it was, I was learning as I went along, so when I was doing these interviews, one of the things I did was, during the interview itself, I wasn’t really thinking about analysis, I was just gathering information, and so I started off just hand scribbling some notes and then I would type these notes into my laptop and what I would do is print them out and look at them, and highlight things in different colors that seemed to group around passively looking, actively looking, switching consumption, so I did that for the first handful because I was learning and trying to figure out how to take this fire hose of information and find some nuggets that actually really meaningful and need to be grouped together. I think the next set that I did, because all of these interviews, I should mention, this is also something interesting, they were all done over the phone, and I actually think that made it a lot harder, I would have preferred to have done them in person, but our customers were spread out to the point that it just wasn’t feasible at the time, to do face to face interviews in different cities, so, since I was on the phone, I could type into a laptop, because wasn’t really intrusive in the conversation, so then I just started typing stuff into the computer, and again you start to see, I think it’s mostly just practice. You start to see certain phrases come up or just certain turning points and I don’t really think I have a great methodology. I think it’s mostly typing it into the computer, printing it off, and [inaudible 0:29:02] finding some of those commonalities.
Chris: Yeah, got it, got it, that’s great.
Bob: Cool.
Concept · The Timeline
Grouping stories along the timeline
Amrita’s color-coding around passively looking, actively looking, and switching consumption maps directly onto the JTBD timeline. Every purchase has phases: a first thought, a stretch of passive looking, a period of active looking, the decision, and first use. Sorting what customers say into those phases is how a fire hose of interview notes turns into a clear story of how and why people switch.
Interview the people who fire you
Ervin: I’m curious about one thing; now, once you’re done with that interviewing process in your toolbelt, did anyone get fired? Now that you have this way of doing things, you don’t do it another way?
Amrita: In terms of marketing, I think we’ve realized, for this company that I was doing all the interviews for; we don’t really have to talk a lot about our competitors. Why put the competitors in that person’s mind, when they aren’t necessarily thinking about it themselves? So that was a huge insight that we weren’t really competing with the people that we thought we were competing with. It was really more about focusing the communication from whether it’s an ad or you land on the website and what copy are we writing on the website.
Amrita: There were actually a couple things that we thought were great product features that would entice somebody into using this product, and it turns out that this did not come up in a single one of these interviews. And that made us realize, like, wow, this is totally irrelevant to people, so we don’t really need to be talking about it, instead we should be talking about this other thing.
Amrita: Which, actually this is another really interesting thing, there was another product feature, which most people didn’t think the product did this, so many of them, even in the conversation, were like, “Well, I’m thinking about maybe even cancelling because it doesn’t do this thing,” and I’d be on the phone saying, oh my God, it totally does this thing. But then I realized, we don’t really talk about this anywhere, we assume that people will figure this out by using the product, and so that was a big light bulb moment too. In fact, we had one lady I talked to who had actually gone ahead and cancelled her subscription, and she was really nice when we were talking, and I told her we actually do the thing, she said, oh, I like your company so much better, I’ll switch back, because I didn’t know you did this thing, and that’s why I left. So that’s another thing we want to test, we think it will help with customer retention, because we suspect that she’s not the only person who left because she thought we didn’t do this thing.
Chris: So what we’re saying here at this point is that it’s always useful to do people who not only hire you but also who fire you, to have a portfolio of the two is a really important piece of this, because, again, you spend all this time to get them, but at the point of them leaving you, if you don’t understand what it is, the thing is that it could be small little things you can do that keep the retention that much higher.
Amrita: Absolutely. In fact, the next group of interviews I’m doing is specifically with people who have cancelled. The first round was mostly people who were customers, but there was one that slipped in, I guess she cancelled in between the time I scheduled the interview and the time she actually did the interview. So around August I’ll do another dozen or so with people who have cancelled.
Concept · The struggling moment
Why churned customers are gold
Customers who fire you are sitting on the most useful story you can find: the struggling moment that pushed them out. Amrita discovered that a customer cancelled simply because she did not know the product could do something it already did. That is a struggle created by a communication gap, not a product gap, and it is fixable. Interviewing the people who left often surfaces the cheapest retention wins available.
Logistics: recruiting, scheduling, and showing up honest
Chris: So, can I ask some logistics questions? Because this is what people ask us a lot about; which are things like, how did you find the list, how did you schedule the time, did you pay them, stuff like that.
Amrita: Sure! So, the list was really easy, because this company has tons of customers. They have tens of thousands of customers. We pulled a list of, I forget how many, I think initially we might have emailed about 300 people, because I had no idea how many would respond, and I think we were getting about a 6 percent response, and so we ended up doing an email to people who had signed up within the last four to six weeks. I think we wanted them to have had one real cycle, because this product bills every month, so I think most of them were at the six week mark, and we sent them a pretty simple email. I think one of the things that’s important in the email, and I see people do this the wrong way, in my opinion, which is, don’t tell them you’re just calling to get some feedback, like, be really honest about why you want to even have this conversation, be honest that it’s going to take a bunch of time, because what people hate is when you tell them you only need 15 minutes and then you keep them on the phone for 45, or you tell them you’re just from customer service and you’re calling to get feedback, but really you’re kind of drilling them.
Amrita: Being really clear in the email about why you want to talk to them, and also, who I was. I didn’t want them to think that I was from customer service or I was in a sales role, it was sort of like, literally all I’m interested in understanding more about what led you to choose the product, and we’re going to need about this much of your time, so that’s what I did in the email. And we did pay people, we offered them compensation that was equal to about two months of using the product. Then we scheduled the interview.
Amrita: This is also interesting, it tells you why I have to do this and learn what works and doesn’t work. So, the first time, I thought, I want to make this super simple, lets tell people literally just reply to the email and then we’ll set it up, and then I realized, that was a bad way to do it because then you’re going back and forth by email saying, does this day work, but then I went to using, I think you guys have used the service for your interview, called Time Trade, so I set up a Time Trade account and this way it was really easy for people to just look at the time themselves, and I found that getting them to make the booking made them more likely to show up, because the 1st round I did, I was getting a bunch of no-show, and I think it was also because there was no meeting invite or even if I sent them an invite, they didn’t necessarily, like a lot of people were using a personal email and they weren’t putting it into their calenders. Using Time Trade, everybody basically showed up for the interview, so that was really helpful.
Chris: After setting it up, once I found Time Trade, it made it so much easier, like you said. You actually got better people to show up because they set it, as opposed to going back and forth in your inbox, blowing up with a 1,000 emails.
Amrita: I know, and of course I made a really silly mistake when I first used Time Trade. I thought I had set my calender up properly, and then I was wondering why everyone had chosen to do their interview on a Saturday. So I was like, okay, whatever, and that’s the day I booked the eight, so not only was it eight back to back interviews, I had to give up a Saturday to do them. A beautiful, sunny day, and then I realized that I had put my settings in wrong and that’s the only option I gave people!
Bob: That is dedication.
Advice for JTBD newbies: go do the interviews and shut up
Chris: That is awesome. So what piece of advice do you have for people who are newbies to Jobs to be Done and, you’re on the other side looking back, what is some advice you’d give them?
Amrita: Well, definitely, the main advice is just go out and do the interviews, there’s no way to just learn this in your head. You have to go out and practice and the sooner you do, the better, because I think, like with anything, you’re either going to retain most of what you learned within the first few days after the work shop, and so you have to just get into the habit right away, so that is definitely one thing I’m glad I did.
Amrita: The other thing that was interesting, was that you have to let people talk, and I think it can be uncomfortable to experience in a conversation, especially over the phone. But you have to be okay with that. You have to learn to get used to there being these periods of silence, because you want to give people a chance to collect and really be themselves, and it’s so tempting to try to put words in their mouth, get them to talk. You have to be really careful about that. I caught myself doing that in some of the early ones, where I just wanted them to get to the answer, and then I realized that’s not really how it works. Your job is to ask the right questions that will get them to talk and then just sit back and shut up.
Bob: It’s one of those things where it feels weird doing it a couple times, but once you realize it works, then you get more comfortable doing it. At least for me, when I was learning it, I felt like kind of a weirdo just sitting on the phone, and now it’s like a quirky thing to have to just shut up and feel that dead air on the phone, but 99 percent of the time, it works.
Amrita: Yeah, yeah. I actually worked with a super smart sales guy in the past, and that was one of the things he always told me, like when you’re selling something, is just be quiet, let the other person talk. So as someone who likes to talk I had to reel myself back and let the other person talk, and I definitely would prefer to do more face to face interviews, that’s something I’d love to get more practice doing. One of the things I loved about the workshop and one of the ah-ha moments for me was how much you can learn about somebody by their body language and not just the words that they’re saying, and that’s a lot harder to do over the phone.
Chris: But it still works over the phone, it’s not like you have to do face to face.
Amrita: Totally, yeah. I think the phone is definitely convenient for people as well, you’re not asking them to take as much time out of their day, so like I said, I still found that we got some amazing insights by doing them over the phone. So if you can’t do them face to face, then the phone is certainly a great alternative.
“Your job is to ask the right questions that will get them to talk and then just sit back and shut up.”Amrita Chandra
Wrapping up
Ervin: So, do we have anything else for Amrita?
Bob: If people want to follow you, what’s your Twitter?
Amrita: My Twitter is my name, amritachandra.
Chris: If anybody wants to get a hold of you, just do it through that, or do you have any other way you want people to get a hold of you?
Amrita: Yeah, Twitter is great, or you can go to my company’s website, www.rocketscope.com.
Bob: Okay, well thank you so much for your time, it was very, very helpful, in terms of the experience. Seems like it’s a short time, but so many interviews so quickly, it doesn’t take long.
Chris: You’re setting the bar for everyone else, so keep it up!
Amrita: Well, I had a great time, that workshop was worth every penny, I hope you guys will do a follow up one, I think that it might be interesting to get a group of people who’ve done a bunch of interviews. In fact I’m in Chicago today and I’m having lunch with a guy I met at the workshop, Belmont, who has a bunch of tools as well. So, yeah, I think it’s interesting to talk to other people who have done the interviews, kind of trade notes.
Chris: Yeah, this is old hat for Ross, he’s been around for a long time.
Bob: Yeah, Ross is a great guy.
Chris: Enjoy that, and keep in touch, and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for taking the time to come on.
Amrita: Sounds great, thanks for inviting me.
Bob: Thank you.