Customer Interviews

Customer Interviews are moderated 1:1 sessions conducted over video, phone, or in person that help you understand user needs, motivations, and behaviors, recruiting, scheduling, session execution, recording and transcription, and insight synthesis, all in one place.

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What Are Customer Interviews?

Customer Interviews are one-on-one, moderated sessions that go beyond surface-level feedback to uncover the “why” behind decisions and experiences. They’re conducted by a human moderator on your team, over video, phone, or in person.

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Why It Matters

Hear the “why,” not just the “what.” Understand the motivations behind user behavior to make confident decisions. Simplify operations. Scheduling, invites, reminders, and incentives all run in one flow. Share knowledge fast. Recordings, transcripts, and tags get captured automatically for quick synthesis and sharing, and AI can suggest a summary, chapters, and highlights once a transcript is ready.

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Common Use Cases

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Set Up a Customer Interview Study

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Step 1: Create Your Study

1. Navigate to Studies in the left-side menu.
2. Click New study and select Interviews.
   
3. Add your core study details, title and research goal, participation limit, participant segments (optional), external recruitment (optional), incentives (optional), screener (optional), consent form, custom study attributes, automatic slot-release settings, and participant language preferences.
4. Review your plan, then click Next.

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Step 2: Set Up Your Screener (Optional)

Add multiple-choice, text, or scale questions using the screener editor. Apply logic under Preferences or view the full rules under All Logic, then review and click Next.

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Step 3: Configure External Recruitment (Optional)

If sourcing participants through Great Question’s external recruitment marketplace integration, enter the participant count, request title, description, and recruitment criteria, then review and click Next.

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Step 4: Set Up Your Calendar

Use the calendar setup to define when, how, and with whom interviews are scheduled. Event details. Choose the duration of each interview, the location (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, in-person, or a custom link), and whether to enable livestream for observers. Scheduling style. Choose how sessions are attended and moderated:

• Standard 1:1 — one participant meets with one moderator.
• Collective — multiple moderators attend the same session.
• Round Robin — sessions rotate automatically across a pool of moderators.

Selecting Collective, Round Robin, or Continuous when creating your study automatically configures the matching scheduling and moderation settings. In this section, you’ll also assign moderators, configure scheduling-conflict settings, and add observers if applicable. Availability. Define the date range interviews can be scheduled within, available days and hours, and the timezone sessions should run in. Connected moderator calendars appear alongside the grid so you can add availability directly or switch views to adjust it. Additional options. Set daily or weekly booking limits, buffer time between interviews, minimum and maximum scheduling notice, waitlists, or time proposals.

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Step 5: Review and Publish

Check all sections for accuracy. When ready, click Create to publish your study.

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Managing Your Study After Publishing

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Setup

• Plan — Adjust participant limits, incentives, study attributes, or segments.
• Screener — Edit questions or update qualification logic.
• Calendar — Manage your scheduling setup.
• Incentives — Manage incentive settings.
• Emails — Customize participant-facing communications, including screener invitations, study invites, task reminders, and completion emails.
• Pages — Update the Landing Page and Screener Disqualification Page.
• Automations — Send invitation reminders to candidates who don’t respond after 24 hours, send interview reminders 24 hours before a scheduled session, mark participations as completed and pay incentives 24 hours after an interview, and automatically create an internal calendar event for new bookings.
• Notifications — Choose which email alerts you want to receive for this study.

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Execution

• Participants — Add candidates, track progress, and take actions such as inviting, removing, or reviewing status. This is where most post-publish activity happens.
• Recruitment Requests — Monitor and adjust external recruitment.
• Stats — View email performance metrics such as delivery, opens, and clicks.
• Screener Responses — Review individual or aggregate responses to determine eligibility.
• Interview Guide — Write the questions you want to ask.

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Results

• Tags — Apply or edit study-level or global tags to categorize key findings.
• Synthesis — Group highlights and observations into themes.
• Repository — Access recordings, transcripts, highlights, reels, and assets. Once a transcript is ready, AI can suggest a summary, chapter breakdown, and highlight clips automatically.

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Best Practices

Enable livestream if you want live observers. Observers get a real-time view of the session; while a stream is active, only study moderators can edit the interview notes at the same time, to prevent overwrite conflicts. Check that your meeting provider stays connected. Recording and live observation for external providers (Zoom, Teams, Webex, Google Meet) depend on that integration staying active, a disconnected integration is one of the most common reasons a session recording or transcript goes missing.

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Troubleshooting

Issue	What’s Happening	How to Fix
Participants can’t schedule an interview	The moderator’s calendar isn’t connected, or availability wasn’t set.	Go to Settings → Integrations and connect your Google Workspace or Microsoft calendar. Then, under Calendar → Availability, set your available times and date range.
No available time slots showing	Duration, buffers, or booking limits conflict with your availability.	Check your duration, buffer, and daily/weekly booking limits. Use Troubleshoot mode in the scheduling tool to pinpoint blocked slots.
Calendar warning appears	The selected moderator’s calendar has conflicts, or no provider is connected.	Open Calendar → Attendees, confirm a connected calendar is selected, and toggle conflict checking on.
Participant sees the wrong timezone or time	Timezone mismatch between moderator and participant settings.	Confirm the moderator’s timezone under Calendar → Availability. Participants always see times converted to their own local timezone.
Recording or transcript stuck processing	Longer sessions take longer to process, and occasionally a recording gets stuck rather than failing outright.	Wait — long videos can take a while. If it’s still stuck after an hour, contact support rather than re-recording.
Moderator or observer didn’t receive a calendar invite	They weren’t listed as attendees when the session was scheduled.	Reopen Calendar → Attendees, confirm both moderator and observers are selected, and save to re-trigger invites.
Participant didn’t receive their invite email	The email bounced, landed in spam, or the automation wasn’t enabled.	Confirm the invite was sent from the Stats tab, resend if needed, and ask the participant to check spam.
Participant can’t join the session link	The meeting link was removed, or the provider integration was disconnected.	Reconnect your meeting provider integration and update the location field under Calendar → Event details, then reinvite the participant if needed.
No-shows keep happening	Participants are forgetting, or timezone confusion is a factor.	Enable reminder emails under Automation, and consider shortening your maximum scheduling notice to reduce drop-off.
Incentives not sent after completion	The participant isn’t marked as completed, or the automation isn’t enabled.	Verify the participant’s status is “Sent Thanks” and that automatic incentive sending is enabled under Automation. Send manually if needed.

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Still need help? Contact us at support@greatquestion.co — median response time is 19 minutes during support hours.