34. Lisa Overton on customer intercept interviews

Our guest today is Lisa Overton, a McKinsey alum and an expert on market research. Today Lisa is an independent consultant working on a range of strategy, marketing, and communications issues.  Previously, Lisa ran a boutique qualitative market research firm that offered traditional services such as focus groups as well as more innovative services including customer intercept interviews. In our discussion today we focus in on how to do those customer intercept interviews, and Lisa shares a range of lessons learned that you and I can apply in our practice. We discuss the incentives you need to offer the customer, how to approach customers, the best time of day to get a good interview, how to record responses, how much it will cost to hire capable interviewers, how many they can do per hour, and the types of questions you might want to ask to elicit surprising insights. We also do a role play in which I play a grocery shopper and Lisa interviews me about my grocery shopping habits.