Interviews Unlock Powerful Insights for Your Business
When it comes to understanding your audience, gaining real insights, and making informed decisions, research is key. Not all research methods are created equal.
At Better Way Consulting, one of the most effective tools we offer is interview research. Interviews provide a deep, nuanced understanding that goes beyond what traditional surveys can capture.
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What Are Interviews?
An interview is a qualitative research method involving a conversation between a researcher and a participant. The purpose is to gather detailed information about the participant's thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Unlike surveys, which have limited response options, interviews are open-ended and flexible. This allows participants to share their perspectives in their own words.
Interviews can take different forms depending on your research objectives. A research and evaluation firm conducts interviews one-on-one, in small groups, in person, or virtually. Interviews can be specifically structured or semi-structured. This allows more freedom to explore new topics as they arise.
Interviews are a conversation that allows the researcher to adapt, respond, and dig deeper as needed.
The 4 Benefits of Interviews
Interviews are an incredibly valuable research tool for businesses and nonprofit organizations because they offer depth, context, and flexibility. Here are some of the main benefits:
1. In-Depth Insights
Interviews provide a deep understanding of a person’s thoughts and experiences. Surveys and other quantitative methods can show you what is happening. For example, they can reveal how satisfied customers are and how often they use a product.
Interviews tell you why these things are happening. Why do customers prefer one feature over another? Why is one initiative resonating with your audience while another falls flat?
Interviews help uncover the underlying reasons behind behaviors and attitudes. This type of insight can be incredibly valuable for refining your services, improving customer experiences, and making strategic decisions.
2. Flexibility to Adapt
Unlike a static survey, interviews allow for adaptation in real-time. If a participant mentions something unexpected, the interviewer can press further, asking additional questions to uncover more details. Researchers can explore new ideas or issues as they arise instead of being confined.
For example, imagine you're conducting interviews with customers to understand how they feel about a recent product update. During one of these interviews, a participant mentions a feature that wasn't even on your radar. It turns out to be crucial to their satisfaction.
With a survey, you may have missed this entirely. With an interview, you press into this new topic and uncover insights that could help you improve your offering.
3. Nuanced Understanding of Individual Perspectives
In interviews, participants provide context and explain their answers. This means you can capture nuances that might not be apparent from multiple-choice questions. People’s experiences and opinions are often complex, and interviews give them the space to share that complexity.
For a business or nonprofit organization, this means a richer, more complete understanding of the people you’re serving. Interviews help you look beyond the numbers to see the whole picture. This is true whether you want to understand your customers, employees, or stakeholders.
4. Building Relationships
Another advantage of interviews is that they can help build relationships with the people you’re talking to. Whether interviewing customers, employees, or community members, a well-conducted interview shows that you value their opinions and experiences. This can help foster loyalty, improve engagement, and create a sense of connection with your audience.
Interviews Partner Well With Surveys
While interviews are powerful on their own, they’re even more effective when partnered with surveys. Surveys are great for gathering quantitative data from a large number of people. They allow you to measure trends, track changes over time, and identify patterns across your audience.
Surveys have their limitations. They provide breadth but not depth—they can tell you what’s happening but not why. When used with interviews, you get the statistical power of quantitative data and the rich insights of qualitative research.
Here’s how this might look in practice:
Start with a Survey: You can begin by sending a survey to your audience. This will help you collect data on their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction levels. This allows you to identify key trends and areas that need further exploration.
Follow Up with Interviews: Once you have your survey results, interviews help you dive deeper into specific topics. If your survey shows that customers are unhappy, interviews can help you understand why. They also help you find specific ways to improve.
This mixed-methods approach ensures you have a well-rounded understanding of your target audiences. It also helps increase your confidence in the results. When the same theme emerges in both survey data and interviews, you know it’s something worth paying attention to.
Real World Example: A Better Afterschool Program
Consider how to apply these data-collection methods in a real-world scenario. Let's say an educational nonprofit struggles with declining participation in one of its afterschool programs. They gather survey data from parents, which shows that many families found the program inconvenient.
Next, the nonprofit wants to understand why. To get to the root of the issue, they partner with a research firm like Better Way to conduct in-depth interviews with parents.
During the research process, they discover the program’s timing was the main problem. Many parents find it difficult to pick up their children at the scheduled end time because of work commitments. Parents also mention that they want more enrichment activities, like arts and music, included in the curriculum.
Armed with this new information, the nonprofit makes two key changes. First, they adjust the program hours to better align with parents’ schedules. Next, they add new activities based on feedback. As a result, participation in the program increases, and parents report higher levels of satisfaction.
Again, we see that interviews uncover specific, actionable insights that might not have come to light through surveys alone. By pressing further into parents’ experiences, they identify the real issues and make meaningful changes.
Conclusion
At Better Way Consulting, we believe in the power of interviews to help organizations better understand their audience. Whether you’re refining a product or program, interviews provide the depth and flexibility needed to uncover actionable insights.
Interviews help you get beyond the numbers, understand the "why" behind behaviors, and adapt to new information in real time. Ready to explore how interviews can benefit your organization? Let’s find a better way—together.
